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AMERICAN 
 TOWNS and PEOPLE 
 
The White House is a sort of National shrine. 
 
American 
 Towns and People 
 
 b)' Harrison Rhodes 
 
 Author of 
 'High Life." "The Flight to Eden," etc. 
 
 With Illustrations 
 
 T^ew Tor\ 
 
 Robert M. McBride ^^ Co. 
 
 1920 
 
Copyright, 1920, by 
 Robert M. McBride & Co. 
 
 
 Copyright, 
 
 1910, 1915, 1916, 1917. 1918, 1919, 1920, 
 
 BY ELarper & Brothers 
 
 Printed in the 
 United States of America 
 
 Published, 1920 
 
 ;0)CI.A604028 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Why Is a Bostonian? 1 
 
 II. Who Is a Philadelphian? .... 27 
 
 III. What Is a New-Yorker? .... 53 
 
 IV. The Portrait of Chicago .... 79 
 V. Washington, the Cosmopolitan . . 101 
 
 VI. Baltimore 131 
 
 VII. Is There a West? 153 
 
 VIII. The Hotel Guest 175 
 
 IX. The High Kingdom of the Movies . 199 
 
 X, The American Child 227 
 
 XI. The Society Woman 253 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The White House is a sort of National Shrine, 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 In Scollay Square the old tradition is less in evidence 9 
 
 A street-corner seeker after truth 23 
 
 An early morning rite 35 
 
 The park affords charming vistas of the city beyond 59 
 
 Vast aqueducts of traffic span the sky .... 75 
 
 The Windy City on a windy day 85 
 
 Chicago River, now a clear blue flood, flowing under 
 
 Rush Street Bridge 97 
 
 The austere towers of the Smithsonian Institute . 121 
 
 Belair Market 129 
 
 Traces of old Spain have a winning, half-pathetic 
 
 charm 157 
 
 A superannuated cowboy of about eighty . . . 171 
 The old hotel office was what the forum perhaps 
 
 was to Rome 185 
 
 Stimulating a vampire with strains from Strauss . 203 
 
 The reformer is an ever-present affliction . . . 219 
 Women of the highest position feel deeply the beauty 
 
 of the Bolshevik doctrine 255 
 
AMERICAN 
 TOWNS and PEOPLE 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 
 
 THE author of the "Rollo Books," famous 
 in that dim nineteenth century, wrote 
 also the familiar "Lucy" and "Jonas Books," 
 and another series less well known but in- 
 valuable to the American who is curious- 
 minded as to the social history of his country. 
 Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of 
 Knowledge (is the title not indicative of the 
 pretty, harmless wit of those innocent days?) 
 is the record of an early attempt to "see Amer- 
 ica first." Marco Paul, after showing his na- 
 tive city of New York to the excellent For- 
 rester, at once his cousin and his tutor, visited 
 In that relative's company, and in a hot and 
 praiseworthy pursuit of knowledge, Ver- 
 mont, the Springfield Armory, the forests 
 of Maine, Boston, and the Erie Canal! 
 Agreeable though all the volumes are, it is 
 with the one upon the capital of Massachu- 
 setts that we are here concerned, and in espe- 
 cial with the chapter describing the visit of 
 our travelers to the Bunker Hill Monument. 
 "Who fought the battle on Bunker Hill?" 
 
 Marco Paul asked his cousin Forrester. And 
 
 1 
 
2 American Towns and People \ 
 
 the author of the Adventures, who was, it is to I 
 be noted, a Bostonian, comments in this aston- 1 
 ishing way upon the young hero's ignorance. 
 "Marco Paul," he says, "was a New York boy 
 and did not know much about the battle of 
 Bunker Hill." 
 
 In 1843 the Revolution was not — one would 
 now say — so very remote. The discovery is 
 therefore the more significant that so long ago 
 Boston was casting at New York the same re- 
 proach of being "un-American" over which 
 recent writers upon our civilization have so 
 often become philosophical. Even after more 
 than three-quarters of a century this acidity 
 of tone about poor Marco Paul seems, at the 
 very outset, to warn ofif any New-Yorker pre- 
 paring to comment upon Boston. Perhaps 
 the only apology for recklessness is reckless- 
 ness itself. But it can at least be hinted that 
 nowadays few New-Yorkers are New-York- 
 ers; they are more commonly Ohioans. 
 
 Since the Bostonian attitude toward New 
 York has, by the accident of Marco Paul's 
 faux pas upon Bunker Hill, already been in- 
 troduced, it may be as well to go on, and to 
 say that their feeling concerning the metro- 
 polis, varying in quality and in emotional 
 force, is one of the most curious and distin- 
 guishing marks of our other cities. Philadel- 
 phia, for example, ignores New York. Bos- 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 3 
 
 ton, on the other hand, is over-acutely 
 conscious of it, hates it, despises it, loves its 
 fleshpots and its Great White Way, and is 
 ashamed of itself for doing so. All this, be 
 it clearly understood, is said in praise rather 
 than dispraise of Boston. But the facts are 
 as they are. New York is perpetually upon 
 Boston's nerves. To a foreign school-boy 
 studying his atlas, Philadelphia w^ould seem 
 to be considerably nearer the mouth of the 
 Hudson than Boston; spiritually, if one may 
 put it that way, the New England capital is 
 far closer at hand. 
 
 Until very recently it was possible to take 
 a train from Boston to New York at a later 
 hour than you could enter the subway and 
 take a street-car for Cambridge — a fact 
 which in the days before Harvard became a 
 serious scholarly athletic college was often 
 taken by belated and cheerful students of that 
 institution as a sign direct from God. The 
 development of what was known as the ''brass- 
 bed train" between the two cities was evidence 
 of an almost exacerbated anxiety to make the 
 night transit endurable to overwrought, quiv- 
 ering creatures returning to the shores of 
 Massachusetts Bay. New York's tango roofs 
 and pleasure palaces are the constant familiar 
 haunt of Bostonians, yet it is never certain that 
 the visitors are quite at their ease there. 
 
4 American Towns and People 
 
 Even for the larkish trip to New York they 
 bring certain grave prejudices and scientific 
 ideas as to hygiene, which look very odd when 
 unpacked in Manhattan. A Bostonian lady 
 who was enthusiastic over New York's danc- 
 ing-in-public restaurants, asserting that at 
 home it was difficult regularly to secure this 
 excellent health-exercise, caused considerable 
 confusion one New-Year's Eve in a place of 
 entertainment where, for that evening, only 
 champagne was being served to patrons, by in- 
 sisting upon having ''certified milk," which 
 was, she stoutly maintained, the exact thing 
 which could, without harming her, keep her 
 going at three in the morning! 
 
 It is no bad thing to pass from the image 
 of the blousy beauty of Manhattan to one of 
 the more frugal, nipped loveliness of Boston. 
 Of course, the New-Yorker might well feel 
 terror on his arrival in Boston, especially if 
 it is after nightfall, in that strange Back Bay 
 station where the electric lamps seem to pro- 
 duce light without shedding it. He might 
 reasonably fear that now justice is at last to 
 be meted out to him. But when the first 
 moment's panic is over he cannot but feel, as 
 does doubtless the repatriate Bostonian, that 
 the contrast is, for the time being at least, 
 agreeable between what he has left and the 
 cooler, grayer, more distinguished civiliza- 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? '5 
 
 tion to which he has come. More distin- 
 guished, in the accurate sense of that word, 
 Boston is. While the national metropolis is 
 at once vehement and vague, the New Eng- 
 land capital is more measured, more clean- 
 cut, more distinguished in the sense of having 
 somehow so concentrated and clarified its spe- 
 cial flavor that no one can for a moment doubt 
 that — for better or worse — Boston is Bo'ston. 
 When the sharp east wind has cleared away 
 the vapors of Broadway, New York becomes 
 less an actuality than a nightmare, and the 
 northern town and its inhabitants are per- 
 ceived to be standing very firmly on their own 
 feet. 
 
 These northern folk are passionately Bos- 
 tonian — if they are passionately anything. It 
 is pleasant for a moment to think of the lady 
 living in Milton (a town of concentrated Bos- 
 tonianism) who said of her son, whose career 
 in the diplomatic service of his country had 
 kept him in Paris for several years, that her 
 only fear was that he should "get out of touch 
 with Milton"! There was no confusion in 
 her mind as to what is valuable in life. In 
 this matter of values and belief in Boston the 
 Society for the Preservation of New England 
 Antiquities presented itself lately to great ad- 
 vantage, gallantly going to the courts to pre- 
 vent the alien — generally French-Canadian — 
 
6 American Towns and People 
 
 from changing his name by the ordinary legal 
 processes to that of any of Boston's old, his- 
 toric families. There is a something here 
 that insists on being like the Gilbert and Sul- 
 livan operetta. And yet there is also some- 
 thing magnificent — in a democracy — in the 
 fact that you can become Smith, but never — 
 s^all we say Romans? 
 
 The intentions of this article — though hon- 
 orable — are not topographical, yet something 
 must be said of the look of Boston, for it is 
 indicative of the town's inner quality — as in- 
 deed to any one who has a feeling for the per- 
 sonality of places is always the look of streets 
 and squares and parks. New York sprawls; 
 Boston really composes itself around Beacon 
 Hill, and falls away from the lovely, peace- 
 ful, brick quarter which surrounds the State 
 House to the business district and the foreign 
 North End on one side, and on the other to 
 the Back Bay, the great South End, the huge, 
 trailing suburbs that lie farther out, and fin- 
 ally the New England country of which it is 
 the metropolis and the commercial and spir- 
 itual head. Somehow all through the town 
 one gets hints of the great tributary province. 
 There is a little old shop near the busy center 
 where are displayed in the window slippery- 
 elm and licorice sticks — does the sight not 
 bring all New England's rocky fields and 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 7 
 
 white villages immediately before your eyes? 
 The State House is to the eye as to the 
 imagination the center of New England, and 
 its gilded dome rising over the dark-green of 
 the elms on the Common is typical of the un- 
 exuberant, distinguished beauty of this North- 
 ern Athens. There is probably quite as much 
 gold upon the dome as would be necessary to 
 decorate a New York restaurant. But in the 
 former case there is no vulgar ostentation in 
 its use. There is not even the kind of warm, 
 barbaric lavishness, which incrusts the Vene- 
 tian St. Mark's with the precious metal. The 
 Bostonian State House seems instead to pro- 
 claim that here in a shrewd, inclement climate 
 and upon an arid, stony soil New England in- 
 dustry and thrift have won a living and even 
 wealth, and that when the occasion reasonably 
 and sanely demands it New England can be 
 lavish, almost spendthrift. You get a sense 
 everywhere in Boston that they spend money 
 upon public enterprises like state houses, 
 opera-houses, art museums, and so forth be- 
 cause there is a need to have such things and 
 the money can be found, not because the 
 money is there and there is a need to find some 
 way to spend it — the latter being a much more 
 characteristic American frame of mind. 
 Reason rather than emotion guides New Eng- 
 land expenditure, and the result is a cool and 
 
8 American Towns and People 
 
 restrained distinction which the wanton cities 
 of the South and West never quite attain. 
 
 The old Boston dwellings upon Beacon 
 Hill have this look of tempered luxury to per- 
 fection. But what is more remarkable is the 
 sobriety of domestic architecture in the newer 
 districts, even in that decorous Common- 
 wealth Avenue, in which the true Bostonian 
 so fantastically asks the stranger to detect a 
 note of the vulgarity of the notiveau riche. 
 The Louis's have never wrought much of 
 their French mischief in the Back Bay. A 
 certain indigenous ugliness of architecture is 
 preferred, solid and roomy, suggesting com- 
 fort rather than slender, gilded elegance. 
 There is not much foreign-lace nonsense at 
 the windows; instead sometimes only simple, 
 colored silk curtains drawn back to admit the 
 sun and allow its due hygienic efifect. Where 
 the outlook is toward the south, plants flour- 
 ish in the Bostonian windows, and the passer- 
 by instinctively feels that they actually grow 
 there, and may even be watered by the ladies 
 of the house instead of being merely a tem- 
 porary installation by some expensive florist, 
 to be lavishly and immediately replaced when 
 neglect has withered them. 
 
 The Bostonian interior, too, has something 
 of this frugal quality, and may be recognized 
 even in houses in the Middle West where the 
 
In Scollay Square the old tradition is less in evidence. 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 9 
 
 influence of the summer upon the North Shore 
 has chastened the exuberance of taste natural 
 in those remoter regions. There is something 
 extremely pleasant in these sunny, cleanly 
 scoured, airy, rather scantily furnished rooms, 
 with big expanses of polished floor and well- 
 worn furniture. They seem a little old-fash- 
 ioned now, but this is merely a proof that taste 
 struck Boston in something like the '70's of 
 the last century, a little before it hit our other 
 towns. 
 
 There is, of course, a comic side to this 
 frugality. One can imagine that in the early 
 esthetic days the inexpensiveness of the jar of 
 dried cattails was not without its appeal to the 
 Bostonian decorator. No Bostonian thinks of 
 spending his income; no New-Yorker thinks 
 of spending merely his income: this is an ex- 
 aggeration of something fundamentally true. 
 The solid, piled-up, quiet wealth of Massa- 
 chusetts is enormous — what the department- 
 store experts call the "shopping power" of the 
 regions within a forty-mile circle around the 
 State House dome is some amazing propor- 
 tion of the purchasing ability of the whole 
 country. Yet Boston shops have never the air 
 of inviting gay, wayward extravagance, the 
 highest-priced ones are the least obtrusive, 
 and the best always seem as if they could be 
 instantly adapted to the sale of that tradi- 
 
lO American Towns and People 
 
 tional black silk of our grandmothers which 
 could ''stand alone." 
 
 Bostonian spending is the result of mature 
 and deliberate thought. It is rarely vulgar, 
 but it knows nothing of the spendthrift's joie 
 de vivre. People in New York may dine at 
 the Ritz from obscure motives of economy, a 
 vague feeling that a holiday for the servants 
 at home may make them more efficient at 
 other times. In Boston they eat in restaurants, 
 one somehow feels, only after fasting and 
 prayer. The name given at once to the latest 
 smart hotel, "The Costly-Pleasure," is signifi- 
 cant. There is even something a little grim 
 about the phrase; it is almost as if the cost- 
 liness of pleasure repelled instead of allured, 
 as it does in less serious towns. Young men 
 in evening dress do not idly stroll forth into 
 the Bostonian streets with their overcoats care- 
 lessly unbuttoned; it would give a false idea 
 that a white-waistcoated Costly-Pleasure 
 night-life is real Bostonianism. They hurry 
 into motors and taxis and are about their busi- 
 ness of dining and dancing seriously, almost 
 half apologetically. There is, in short, very 
 little bead on native Boston pleasure; it does 
 not run to froth. 
 
 The job of being very young and very gay 
 and very foolish is left to Harvard undergrade 
 uates. The proximity of a great supply of 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? ii 
 
 young men with hearty appetites and strong 
 dancing legs has made Boston fashion depend- 
 ent and complaisant. The boys, in conse- 
 quence, do all the things which gay young 
 men do in light magazine fiction. They go 
 to parties with a self-confident indifiference as 
 to whether they have been invited or not. 
 And there is a pretty story of some lads bring- 
 ing suit-cases from Cambridge, in which they 
 packed bottles of champagne, thus transferring 
 supplies to the groves of Academe after the 
 ball. It is no idle boast of the enthusiastic ad- 
 vocates of Harvard education that youth there 
 is more prepared to deal with the great world 
 than are the students of a country college. 
 The crimson thread of Harvard is woven into 
 the very fabric of Bostonian existence; yet 
 though it is perpetually there, it always seems 
 exotic. 
 
 The Bostonian opera — now suspended — 
 was beautifully Bostonian; it presented in 
 agreeable clearness the indigenous social qual- 
 ity. The decoration of the house was quiet 
 gray and gold, and the garb of the audience 
 had on the whole something of the same so- 
 briety. To this effect the native frugality 
 doubtless contributed; on opera nights the 
 streets leading to the edifice were thronged 
 with intrepid women equipped to give battle 
 to extravagance for music's sake, with galoshes 
 
12 American Towns and People 
 
 and woolen scarfs — in this rude Northern cli- 
 mate even "fascinators" must be woolen. If 
 an Italian lady in evening dress could not af- 
 ford a cab to the opera, she would quite sim- 
 ply stay at home — and yet we prate of the love 
 of music nourished in those sunny climes! 
 This tribute to ladies in fascinators is not to 
 be taken as meaning that there were not more 
 luxurious women — and plenty — in the stalls 
 and boxes — lovely, carriage-borne creatures, 
 expensively dressed and well jeweled, prob- 
 ably with the best old Brazilian stones; the 
 point is that the total effect of the Bostonian 
 audience was what it rarely is in opera-houses 
 — subordinate to the stage. 
 
 The opening night was an incredible event. 
 Banquet parties of the gayest Bostonians had 
 gathered to dine at an hour when food would 
 poison the fashionable people of other cities, 
 and the crush of carriages was beyond every- 
 thing ever known, not because more people 
 were going to the opera than go in other cities, 
 but because, for the first time in the history 
 of opera, every one wanted to arrive on time. 
 The intervals of the performance were de- 
 voted to a general promenade, in which many 
 box-holders joined. Indeed, the attention 
 paid to the occupants of boxes by the general 
 audience was barely sufficient to induce fe- 
 male loveliness to display its charms in the 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 13 
 
 traditional entr'acte manner — the ladies, if the 
 truth be told, excited about the same amount 
 of admiration as did the silver-gilt soda-water 
 fountain which had been installed in the foyer. 
 Here, it seemed to the irreverent outsider, the 
 last word had been said. To have linked 
 opera with the nut-sundae is to have, once for 
 all, domesticated the gay, wayward institu- 
 tion and made it Boston's harmless, admirable 
 own. 
 
 Light-minded comment, however, never 
 discloses more than one side of a medal. The 
 Bostonian opera showed, as a matter of fact, 
 an admirable and sane sense of proportion. 
 It was not the London, the Paris, or the New 
 York opera. Why, pray, should it have been? 
 It was opera of exactly the size and sumptu- 
 ousness which it was likely that a town of 
 Boston's extent and wealth could afford. It 
 seemed something which could reasonably 
 hope to exist, not the product of a spasmodic, 
 hysterical effort such as occasionally brings 
 fabulously paid singers to some of our smaller 
 cities for a feverish May Festival or special 
 operatic week. It was not a provincial enter- 
 prise, because it was not aping any metropolis. 
 It was the opera of the capital of New Eng- 
 land, and it stood firmly, like many other 
 neighboring institutions, upon its own sturdy, 
 galoshed, Bostonian feet. It may, of course, 
 
14 American Towns and People 
 
 always be open to question whether operatic 
 art is not a too essentially artificial and emo- 
 tional blend ever to please the Bostonian pub- 
 lic as does the classically severe fare offered in 
 Symphony Hall. But the Huntington Avenue 
 opera was meant to stand or fall by the genu- 
 ine music-loving support of its public. Even 
 if the operatic dose was bitter, it was to be 
 disguised by no "diamond horseshoe," by no 
 soft Ionian ways. And who shall say that, 
 though now suspended, the Boston opera has 
 not had its nation-wide effect? Has not its 
 gifted scene-painter already been chosen by 
 New York to do the decorations for its lead- 
 ing summer "girl-show," and does he not thus 
 continue to enliven Boston? 
 
 Culture has always seemed to the outsider a 
 little rigorous in Boston. But as one looks 
 over the whole field of American life one is 
 inclined to say that desperate situations de- 
 mand desperate remedies, and that to have 
 caught culture in any trap, even just to have 
 got it fighting in a corner, is an achievement. 
 
 This is not altogether a question of art, 
 though art is no doubt one of the town's chief 
 preoccupations. Still less is it a question of 
 producing art. It is no great reproach to Bos- 
 ton that it is nowadays more a center of appre- 
 ciation than creation. There is here no ques- 
 tion of where the divine afflatus blows most 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 15 
 
 fiercely. New York is the mart, and that is 
 about all there is to be said upon an already 
 threadbare subject. 
 
 Culture has, perhaps, more to do with edu- 
 cation than with art. We study enough in 
 America — that is, we go to schools and col- 
 leges — but somehow, it may as well be ad- 
 mitted frankly, we do not succeed in weaving 
 our education into the very fabric of our daily 
 social intercourse; we are not cultivated in 
 the unobtrusive, easy way of the best English- 
 men and Frenchmen. Now the newspaper 
 humorists' best jokes hinge upon the alleged 
 universality of Boston culture. And though 
 the alien visitor may never find the infant who 
 spouts Greek while brandishing his rattle, he 
 will in simple justice admit that education has 
 gone both far and deep in Boston, that slang 
 is not the only dialect spoken, and that even 
 among shop-girls and elevator-boys some 
 traces of our original national speech are still 
 to be detected. 
 
 Here, parenthetically, it may be said that 
 what is meant by Bostonians speaking English 
 is the words themselves rather than the in- 
 tonation and pronunciation with which they 
 are uttered. The ''Boston accent" is of course 
 famous and cannot but fail to give the keen- 
 est pleasure to even a child traveling thither. 
 The point to be made here is that it does not, 
 
i6 American Towns and People 
 
 as the Bostonians appear to think, approxi- 
 mate to the English accent of England any- 
 more than any other of our national accents. 
 The total elision of the R and the amazing 
 broad, flat A— as in "Park Street" and "Har- 
 vard College" — give to Bostonian speech a 
 magnificently indigenous tang, hint at juniper 
 and spruce forests and rocky fields and pump- 
 kins and Thanksgiving and pie; make you 
 feel again how triumphantly New England is 
 new, and not old, English. But its vocabulary 
 is, on the whole, the best chosen of all the 
 American dialects. 
 
 It is somewhat difficult to find in ordinary 
 Bostonian speech the ten- and twelve-syllabled 
 words of which it is popularly supposed to be 
 exclusively composed. But the joke is so old 
 that there must be something in it. As far 
 back as Brook Farm it was alleged that they 
 said, "Cut the pie from the center to the pe- 
 riphery," and asked, "Is the butter within your 
 sphere of influence?" But this was humor, 
 as New England as a wintergreen lozenge. It 
 was a by-product of an unashamed passion 
 for education which distinguished American 
 antebellum days. Even in the Middle West, 
 when James Garfield, later to be President, 
 with his friends in the little fresh-water col- 
 lege of Hiram, indulged in "stilting," as they 
 termed this humorous riding of the high- 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 17 
 
 horses of the language, they were in the Bos- 
 tonian tradition. "Stilting" has perhaps dis- 
 appeared. But there are here and there in- 
 dications of the survival of the English of a 
 robuster period. The old lady who said that 
 she didn't, after all, know that Bostonians were 
 so "thundering pious," produced with the 
 phrase all the effect of an Elizabethan oath. 
 She made you feel that Bostonian culture was 
 no mere thin affair of yesterday. 
 
 It should be acknowledged handsomely 
 that there is a certain amenity of tone in the 
 town which comes not so much from exuber- 
 ant good nature as from a reasoned belief in 
 life's higher interests. The policeman who in 
 Commonwealth Avenue used to stop prome- 
 nading strangers and urge them to turn and 
 admire the sunset was extending the city's hos- 
 pitality no less to nature's beauty than to the 
 visitors. He was notably Bostonian in that 
 he was ashamed neither of the sunset nor of 
 his belief that pleasure was to be derived from 
 its contemplation. His culture was genuinely 
 a part of his existence, of his everyday life. 
 And culture is unquestionably a more integral 
 part of Boston's normal existence than of our 
 other cities' lives. Only in Boston, to imagine 
 a concrete and pleasing example, could a lady, 
 if she were so inclined, be distinguished by a 
 love for extreme decolletage and for early 
 
1 8 American Towns and People 
 
 Buddhistic philosophy. There is, in Boston, 
 nothing essentially inharmonious in such a 
 combination. 
 
 In any case, variations from a standard type 
 are not so severely penalized in Boston as in 
 other parts of our country. Eccentricity is 
 almost encouraged; to take but one example, 
 old age is openly, almost brazenly, permitted. 
 Just how they kill the old off in New York 
 is not known, but they get rid of them some- 
 how. Boston, on the contrary, has famous old 
 people, especially old ladies, and the commu- 
 nity's pride in them is not merely that they 
 have been able so long to withstand the Bos- 
 ton climate. These veterans do not eat their 
 evening meal up-stairs on a tray; instead, their 
 visit to a dinner-table honors and enlivens the 
 board. There is something extraordinarily 
 exciting in meeting the lady whose witticisms 
 were famous when you were almost a child 
 and finding her still tossing them off so vigor- 
 ously and gayly that you can with a clear con- 
 science encourage your own children to grow 
 up with the promise that when they are old 
 enough to dine out they, too, shall be privi- 
 leged to go to Boston and hear really good 
 talk. 
 
 The New England capital cherishes affec- 
 tionately links with the past. There was un- 
 til lately for some favored people the possi- 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 19 
 
 bllity of going to tea in a faded, old-fashioned 
 Boston drawing-room, from the windows of 
 which you saw the sunset across the Charles 
 River basin, and hearing wise, graceful, ten- 
 der talk that made the literary past of Eng- 
 land and America for almost three-quarters 
 of a century seem like the pleasant gossip of 
 to-day. The delight of such moments in the 
 fading light was poignant — the tears would 
 come into one's eyes at the realization that it 
 was all too good to be true and also too good 
 to last. 
 
 The respect for the person or the thing 
 which has become "an institution" is always 
 to be noted with interest in our American life. 
 And for an evening newspaper — a vulgar and 
 fly-blown thing elsewhere — to have a half-sa- 
 cred character is possible only in Boston. The 
 publication in question is not thought of as a 
 mere private enterprise; it is integrally a part 
 of the whole community's life, its policy and 
 its grammar are both constant matters for the 
 searchings of the New England conscience. 
 It is even solemnly asserted — by those who 
 should know — that more Bostonians die on 
 Friday than on any other day because they 
 thus make sure of being in the special Satur- 
 day night obituary notices! To pay, even in 
 the date of death, such a tribute to the Bos- 
 tonian tradition is magnificent. 
 
20 American Towns and People 
 
 But if one is to speak of institutions, there 
 is of course Harvard College, without which 
 it is impossible to imagine Boston and Bos- 
 ton culture. Changes in Cambridge are 
 changes in Boston. For a ten or twenty year 
 period there has been a determined and con- 
 scientious attempt across the Charles to break 
 down the old barriers and traditions which 
 kept Harvard from being democratic and effi- 
 cient in the modern way. What has been ac- 
 complished in Cambridge is for the purposes 
 of this article less important than what has 
 been wrought in Boston. Undergraduates 
 may take innovation lightly, but in the fast- 
 nesses of clubs upon Beacon Hill irate old gen- 
 tlemen declare that Harvard is now nothing 
 but a **slap-shoulder college," and younger 
 philosophers of a more suavely cynical turn 
 of mind deplore the out-Yaleing of Yale, and 
 the rough, boyish virility, wholly unconnected 
 with education, which, they maintain, now 
 distinguishes Cambridge rather than New 
 Haven. They tell you that "college spirit," 
 with all its attendant vulgarities of tone, is 
 rampant where the college elms once stood, 
 and there are no longer any disloyal sons of 
 Harvard. This is the pleasant, crabbed, char- 
 acteristic way in which Boston tells you that, 
 after all, it is moving with the times, and that 
 if a big, regenerative movement as some be- 
 
 I 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 21 
 
 lieve is sweeping over the country, it will have 
 Harvard men in the very first battle-line. Bos- 
 ton may bewail changes in the nation, but it 
 knows they cannot happen without changes in 
 Harvard. Centuries of history prove it. 
 
 These centuries of history are singularly 
 alive in Boston. The reference is not to Fan- 
 euil Hall or the Old South Church or any 
 of the historic spots about which our modern 
 Marco Pauls from Michigan and Oregon 
 know so much. What is meant is the amaz- 
 ing sense of a continuous social connection 
 back to the very English roots of the New 
 England tree. 
 
 An unwise stranger, sitting at ease in a Bos- 
 tonian club one day, ventured the observation, 
 not deeply original or stimulating, that Bos- 
 ton was remarkable for the way in which the 
 old Bostonian families had kept the money 
 and the position and were still, as it were, in 
 the saddle. The Bostonians looked at one an- 
 other. They murmured a negative, and the 
 faintest trace of embarrassment seemed to 
 creep over the group. The confused stranger 
 was so sure that his remark, if banal, was true 
 that he thought they had not understood. He 
 carefully explained again. The negative was 
 now sharper and the embarrassment deeper. 
 
 "I don't think you quite understand — " be- 
 gan one of the Bostonians; and it is possible 
 
22 American Towns and People 
 
 that the miserable stranger might have tried 
 to explain still again had not his friend gone 
 on: 
 
 "You see, there are almost no Bostonians 
 living here;" — he paused for an instant — "al- 
 most all the Bostonian families went back 
 home at the time of the Revolution. The in- 
 habitants here now, with the exception of per- 
 haps four families, are all Salem people!" 
 
 There is no way of commenting upon such 
 an episode ; there it is, in sheer Bostonian beau- 
 ty, for such as are worthy of seeing its Bos- 
 tonianism. The tormented un-Bostonian mind 
 will possibly seek refuge in the thought of the 
 club itself. (One does not say clubs, although 
 it is just possible to maintain that there are 
 two in Boston.) Its grave, suave distinction 
 can only be savored by many visits and by 
 quiet, meditative hours. But once you have 
 felt its charm you will henceforth find the or- 
 dinary American organization more like a 
 hotel or a railway station than like a club. To 
 sign no checks, but instead to receive an un- 
 obtrusive and unitemized bill at the end of 
 the month, is at once to gain the impression 
 that you are being notably treated like a gen- 
 tleman. The impression is deepened by gen- 
 uine blue Canton ware, by waiters of a dig- 
 nified and ancient kindliness which has else- 
 where disappeared from American life, and 
 
Bh . n^Nij m 
 
 A street' corner seeker after truth. 
 
JVhy Is a Bostonian? 23 
 
 by food excellent in that strange, tempered 
 New England way — oysters from the club's 
 own planted waters, and peppers and pepper 
 sauces dated and labeled like vintage wines. 
 
 The right to belong to such a club is, as it 
 were, beyond the power of the mere individual 
 to acquire — it is something with or without 
 which he is born. The club, indeed, has been 
 described as an "Institution for the Congeni- 
 tally Eminent." But within its doors you 
 catch furtive hints of an inaccessible inner 
 eminence — caused possibly by Bostonian in- 
 stead of Salem descent — which makes even its 
 exclusiveness seem common. There is a fabu- 
 lous story of an eighth-degree Bostonian who 
 referred lightly to his rare visits to this holy 
 of club holies, of which he was, as it were 
 automatically, a member, and said that it was 
 "at times a pleasure to be franchement ca- 
 naille/' In this wind-swept Northern clime 
 the phrase in the French language somehow 
 seems to accentuate the odd, bitter, cultivated 
 venom of a description of the greatest Bos- 
 tonian exclusiveness as "frankly of the gut- 
 ter." Let Ohio and Oklahoma pause and 
 think before they too quickly describe our 
 American civilization as twentieth-century 
 democracy. 
 
 Bostonian democracy is not the spontane- 
 ous product of naturally genial'temperaments; 
 
24 American Towns and People 
 
 it is rather a thing extorted from oneself by 
 will and fierce conviction. But will, belief, 
 and a conscience can make the Northern city 
 burst into flames. In Boston least of any- 
 where in the North does the passion for human 
 freedom which brought on our own Civil War 
 seem a dead or forgotten thing. And even 
 now the black brother — though modern 
 thought judges him to be not quite a brother 
 in the old sense — can still count on a helping 
 hand and some belief in his future. It is well 
 for the visitor to Boston to sit for a peaceful 
 half-hour under the elms of the Common and 
 think of New England's part in the national 
 life. Geographically and spiritually New 
 England is a little apart. It is a tight, small 
 province, and it is a long way from there to 
 Washington in ordinary times. It is in the 
 crises that Boston becomes most intensely 
 American; then you realize how far-flung is 
 the battle-line of the New England conscience. 
 One never quite forgets in Boston the great 
 moments in our history when the country has 
 kindled at New England's burning heart. 
 
 Modern workers, who believe that charity 
 and good deeds begin at home, sometimes 
 scoflf at the Bostonian "long-distance philan- 
 thropy." And they cite you the story of the 
 lady found wildly weeping because she had 
 just heard how cruel they were to cats in Per- 
 
Why Is a Bostonian? 25 
 
 sia in the thirteenth century! She is indeed a 
 shade fantastical, poor lady; but in the mo- 
 notonous dead levels of American life we can 
 be grateful to Boston for her. 
 
 Indeed, is not gratitude, after all, the chief 
 feeling one has for Boston? Nipped and sour 
 though the fruit sometimes may be of the tree 
 which grows upon her thin soil in her bitter 
 east wind, does not every descendant of the 
 old American stock, and every one who has 
 in his Americanization made the traditions of 
 that stock his own, know that the core of that 
 fruit is sound, and the cider that might be 
 pressed from it the best of our native wines, 
 if one may put it that way? The packed 
 trains that carry Thanksgiving travelers to 
 Boston seem somehow symbolic. The statis- 
 tics are not at hand — when are statistics ever 
 at hand when they are needed? — but it must 
 be that these trains are more heavily 
 freighted than those that go to any other of 
 our great American cities. Whether we are 
 from New England or not, Boston is for many 
 of us, in a deeper sense, our "home town." 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 
 
 A STRANGER recently in Philadelphia 
 on business bethought himself, in his 
 friendless state, of a one-time casual acquaint- 
 ance who had given as his address a Philadel- 
 phia club. From his hotel the visitor tele- 
 phoned the club and asked if he might speak 
 with Mr. John Doe. The telephone-clerk 
 asked the inquirer's name, and after a decent 
 interval replied that Mr. Doe was not in the 
 club. The inquiry was then made whether 
 Mr. Doe was in town and likely to be reached 
 by a note sent to the club. The clerk politely 
 regretted that he was not allowed to give any 
 such information concerning a member of the 
 club. The visitor protested, and was finally 
 allowed to speak to the secretary's office. He 
 gave his name again and, in answer to what 
 seemed an odd query, that of his hotel. He 
 explained that the shortness of his stay in 
 Philadelphia was the reason of his anxiety to 
 know whether he was likely to get hold of 
 Mr. Doe during it or not. The secretary also 
 politely regretted his inability so to violate 
 the privacy of any member's life. The visitor, 
 
 27 
 
28 American Towns and People 
 
 now vaguely feeling that he was being treated 
 like a dun or a detective, protested in slight 
 exasperation that his designs upon Mr. Doe 
 were honorable and purely social — that in- 
 deed he felt so sure of Mr. Doe's desire to 
 welcome him to Philadelphia as to be inclined 
 to insist upon some disclosure of even a club- 
 member's whereabouts. The secretary now 
 grew the least bit weaker, moved eithef by an 
 inner kindliness or by some note of social au- 
 thority in the visitor's voice, and at last grudg- 
 ingly said that although the rules of the club 
 were perfectly clear upon the point, he would 
 as a courtesy consult one or two members of 
 the board of governors who happened at that 
 moment to be in the smoking-room. There 
 was again a decent if tedious interval, and the 
 secretary's voice was once more heard. He 
 reiterated that it was contrary to the rules of 
 the club to give information as to the where- 
 abouts of any member, but that it had been 
 decided that, in this special case, an exception 
 might be made. He was pleased to inform 
 the visitor that Mr. John Doe had died in 
 December of the preceding year! 
 
 The first comment to be made upon this au- 
 thentic anecdote is that, in spite of the secre- 
 tary's courteous pretense, the rules of the club 
 were not violated by the disclosure of a mem- 
 ber's whereabouts, since the inquirer after Mr. 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 29 
 
 John Doe was still left, theologically speak- 
 ing, with a choice between two possible ad- 
 dresses. The second observation, perhaps 
 more profoundly significant, is that death 
 scarcely increases* the inaccessibility of a well- 
 born Philadelphian. 
 
 The tradition of exclusiveness is one of the 
 most striking features of the Philadelphian 
 picture. And if this exclusiveness, which 
 keeps the well-born safely apart from the not- 
 well-born, makes it difficult for even a Phila- 
 delphian to know Philadelphia, how much 
 more nearly impossible does it render such a 
 task for the un-Philadelphian, who must de- 
 pend upon occasional visits and casual gossip 
 for his information. However genial Phila- 
 delphian hospitality may have been, the 
 stranger will find that whatever "set" he may 
 be in, it is, as it were, the wrong set for any 
 general survey of the great town. The alien 
 must frankly preface his impressions of Phila- 
 delphia and its people with a confession of 
 foredoomed ignorance of his subject. 
 
 Long our second largest city, and even now 
 our third, Philadelphia is nevertheless, in the 
 strangest fashion, for most Americans a terra 
 incognita. It is conveniently situated, and yet, 
 almost symbolically, the through trains run 
 round it and not into it. It makes no effort to 
 attract the stranger. It advertises no historic 
 
30 American Towns and People 
 
 attractions, it sets no Broadway ablaze, it beats 
 no tom-toms. Of all our American towns it 
 is the most self-contained. It has almost none 
 of our traditional eagerness for and sensitive- 
 ness to criticism. There is in it nothing of 
 the hurrah-boys' braggadocio which so often 
 marks our American "civic spirit." Philadel- 
 phia does not assert that it is in any way an 
 admirable town; it merely feels that Philadel- 
 phia exists, always has existed, and always will 
 exist, and that in a confused, tumultuous, and 
 vulgar world this is the one uncontrovertible 
 fact, the one solid rock where there is a sure 
 foothold. 
 
 The true Philadelphian neither admires nor 
 dislikes New York; he simply does not know 
 that New York exists. The great lady who 
 managed with difficulty to remember the 
 metropolis as "the place where one goes to take 
 the steamer for Europe" was expressing with 
 a conscious, satirical exaggeration the actual 
 Philadelphian feeling. And a pretty, moroc- 
 co-bound set of address-books, purchased 
 lately at the best Philadelphia stationer's, 
 gives a charming concreteness to this same 
 point of view; the three little volumes are 
 labeled "Philadelphia," "London," and 
 "Paris" — this is the world as Philadelphia 
 sees it I 
 
 Though the social recognition thus grace- 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 31 
 
 fully extended to London and Paris is denied 
 to Boston and New York, it might possibly 
 be granted to the ancient aristocracy of the 
 South. You feel instinctively that lovely, 
 proud, faded Carolinian Charleston is per- 
 haps the only American town with which 
 Philadelphia would feel at ease. Her St. Ce- 
 cilia Ball might rank with the Philadelphia 
 Assemblies of an earlier, happier day, before 
 Pittsburg and North Broad Street had fought 
 their way into the once sacred lists. And it 
 is pleasant upon investigation to discover cor- 
 roborative traces of an agreeable earlier con- 
 nection. The Philadelphia Club is domiciled 
 in the stately old mansion which a rich 
 Charlestonian built that he might pass the 
 winter seasons in the Northern city, and the 
 famous Madeira which bears his name is of- 
 fered you in the houses where the Philadel- 
 phian tradition still beautifully lingers. You 
 have only to try vainly to imagine this gentle- 
 man of the old regime settling upon the Bos- 
 tonian Beacon Hill to realize how far toward 
 the South the Pennsylvanian metropolis lies. 
 
 Indeed, the Southern note in Philadelphia 
 is unmistakable. It is to be found in the spa- 
 cious look of the old houses, and in a certain 
 lavishness of architectural design in the pub- 
 lic edifices of Colonial days. Independence 
 Hall is sumptuous; you have only to compare 
 
J2 American Towns and People 
 
 it with Boston's Old State House and its fru- 
 gal, chastened beauty to realize that Philadel- 
 phia is by comparison a rich, care-free city 
 upon a fat Southern soil. This softer note is 
 to be found, too, in the gay chatter of the 
 Philadelphian ladies, and in the pleasant pres- 
 ence of a well-mannered black population, 
 and a generous, fat cuisine. The local darky 
 has the look of having been established for 
 generations by the Schuylkill, and of having 
 devoted a great deal of that time to the prepa- 
 ration of terrapin and the decanting of vintage 
 wines. He concerns himself naturally with 
 food. In the eighteen-forties, when dashing 
 resorts known as "oyster-cellars" were intro- 
 duced, it is to be noted that the proprietors 
 were blacks. And even now the caterer who 
 has, as it were, the inherited right to direct 
 the entertainments of the real Philadelphians 
 is an ancient, white-haired gentleman of color. 
 Food is always the fashion in Philadelphia. 
 The Philadelphian air is everywhere redolent 
 of good living; even the stranger arriving at 
 the railway station instinctively thinks of the 
 nearest good restaurant and the next meal. It 
 is true that Benjamin Franklin, who is almost 
 tutelary in Philadelphia, proudly said, "My 
 friends, any one who can subsist upon saw- 
 dust pudding and water, as I can, needs no 
 man's patronage," and it is possible that the 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 33 
 
 philosophical gentlemen who still meet in his 
 quaint old red-brick house, far down-town, 
 may be nourished by some such sparse diet, 
 as dry as their discussions. But, in spite of 
 Dr. Franklin, nowhere else in the country is 
 good eating so ancient and stately a tradition. 
 Nowadays, of course, all our grill-roomed 
 towns struggle for a culinary standing, but it 
 is well to remember darker national days; a 
 Philadelphian writer in the early part of the 
 last century tells of barbarous regions of 
 America where a favorite dish was sausage 
 stewed in chocolate! Against such gastro- 
 nomic abominations Philadelphia has through 
 the years stood firm. To-day the proudest 
 hostesses of America have their terrapin 
 brought from Philadelphia. Even the me- 
 tropolis, greedy and luxurious at table, speaks 
 with bated breath of the feasts of Lucullus 
 spread by the Delaware; it is left for Balti- 
 more, sitting in the profusion of tribute which 
 her great bay of Chesapeake pours upon 
 her, alone to dispute culinary preeminence. 
 Tradesmen throughout the country recom- 
 mend their establishments as "Philadelphia 
 Markets," while "Philadelphia Chickens" 
 and "Philadelphia Ice Cream" are terms 
 used as a guarantee of excellence and richness. 
 Marketing is a serious afifair where eating is 
 serious ; it is not so long ago that the most dig- 
 
34 American Towns and People 
 
 nified Philadelphian gentlemen, top-hatted 
 heads of households, themselves accompanied 
 the market-basket on its morning round. 
 
 With the alarming increase of non-alcohol- 
 ism in the country, it has of course become 
 possible nowadays to speak in praise of a rich, 
 groaning, and teetotal table. But the Phila- 
 delphia epicure has not yet moved the whole 
 distance with the times. The bouquet of Ma- 
 deira still lingers faintly around the local ma- 
 hogany tree. At the "English Rooms" in Fun- 
 chal — as the club there is quaintly called — it 
 was until 1918 a matter of serious discussion 
 whether the taste for the island's wine would 
 ever revive in Philadelphia or was slowly 
 dying. Almost anywhere else in the world 
 such talk would have seemed like a labored 
 reconstruction of the eighteenth century; even 
 in Philadelphia itself the courteous ceremo- 
 nials of Madeira-drinking have always some- 
 thing of autumn's loveliness about them; you 
 feel that such customs must with the years 
 pass — if, indeed, anything can quite pass in 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 There has been no Madeira since 1861, so 
 the pink-faced, white-haired gentlemen of the 
 old school tell you; and since you cannot lay 
 down vintages and thus continue your cellar, 
 it is small wonder that a pretty taste in wine 
 is becoming rarer. But here and there in the 
 
An early morning rite. 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 35 
 
 old houses famous old wines, with labels writ- 
 ten in a cramped, old-fashioned hand hung 
 upon the bottles, are still put upon the table 
 after dinner, and stories are told of famous old 
 gentlemen who could by tasting tell nine out 
 of eleven strains of wine which had gone into 
 a blend. In such mellow atmosphere the 
 years seem to slip quietly back, and even the 
 outer barbarian catches something of the 
 Philadelphian content — a little of the Phila- 
 delphian feeling that the world outside Phila- 
 delphia must be an odd place into which it 
 could be neither very safe nor very pleasant 
 to venture; that when the right Madeira is 
 upon the sideboard, the fire and candles lit 
 and the curtains drawn, that outer world is a 
 world well lost. 
 
 The traditions of the Philadelphian cuisine 
 are not only preserved around the sacred 
 kitchen-ranges of the best families, but are 
 kept up by various public organizations os- 
 tensibly devoted to other purposes. There is 
 something suggestive of the banquets of the 
 London City Companies in the dinners, for 
 example, of the Philadelphian insurance com- 
 panies. And pleasant customs have grown up 
 through the long Philadelphian years. The 
 insurance company which is popularly and 
 prettily called "The Green Tree" was dining 
 •■ — and dining well — when the news came of 
 
36 American Towns and People 
 
 the death of Washington, and to this day a 
 toast to his memory is drunk each month by 
 the assembled company. 
 
 In Philadelphia one is not displeased that 
 even the memory of the first President is fra- 
 grant of good cooking. The memoirs of the 
 days when the town was the nation's capital 
 are very considerably concerned with Mr. 
 Washington's dinners, served at four precisely, 
 at a table decorated with silver salvers and 
 alabaster mythological figures two feet high! 
 
 There are in Philadelphia various social 
 and club organizations devoted almost exclu- 
 sively to culinary aims. At one of these a 
 dinner cooked by the members themselves is 
 the greatest tribute which can be paid to a 
 lovely lady visiting the city. And the "Fish- 
 ing Company on the Schuylkill," now com- 
 pelled by the pollution of that once limpid 
 stream to eat fish only, not to catch them, is a 
 historic institution, no mere club. Most of 
 us remember some blithe collegiate indiscre- 
 tion, committed under the influence of "Fish- 
 house Punch." But not all know the pleasant 
 history of the organization from which the 
 beverage takes its name, which has so long 
 existed with almost extra-territorial rights, a 
 corporation vying in pride and dignity with 
 the commonwealth of Pennsylvania itself. 
 There is an incrediblv fat and serious volume 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 37 
 
 giving the annals of the Fish-house through 
 the long, peaceful Philadelphian years. 
 Reading it, you are not surprised at the seri- 
 ous way in which membership in such an in- 
 stitution is regarded. There is a period of 
 novitiate, during which Fish-housers-to-be 
 must humbly appear at a certain number of 
 fixed feastings of the company — a genuine 
 Philadelphian scandal of a year or so ago was 
 of a wayward young gentleman who, having 
 started round the world, brazenly refused to 
 come back to the Schuylkill from Cochin 
 China to attend a yearly fish-eating, and thus 
 lost the membership which would have been 
 the crown of steadier and maturer years. 
 
 Here is an admirable example of Philadel- 
 phian valuations; until you can see the boy's 
 behavior as criminal folly you are unqualified 
 for any profitable study of the Philadelphian 
 social structure. However fantastic the 
 local customs or prejudices may seem to the 
 stranger, they are genuine to the native. 
 
 A famous and agreeable example of Phila- 
 delphianism is the geographical restrictions as 
 to the district where polite life may be led; 
 you may search the world without finding 
 anything comparable to the feeling in Phila- 
 delphia concerning the regions north of Mar- 
 ket Street. To the dweller in the permitted 
 quarter of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and 
 
38 American Towns and People 
 
 Pine" Streets, the mere existence of creatures 
 in that outer darkness seems incredible — with 
 the one curious exception to be noted, that if 
 you belong to certain old Quaker families you 
 may live in Arch Street, just over the border. 
 Otherwise the northern districts might be des- 
 ert land where a colony of rich lepers have 
 built their palatial marble huts. When the 
 Philadelphian opera was transferred from 
 the delightful old red-brick Academy to the 
 vulgar new structure in North Broad Street 
 there were gallant ladies of the old school who 
 swore roundly they would never attend it, 
 and high-bred creatures who, though weak 
 enough to go to the opening performance, 
 nevertheless fainted away as they, for the first 
 time in their lives, crossed Market Street and 
 breathed this vile new air. 
 
 There is an apocryphal story of a delightful 
 and famous old lady who had seen here and 
 there at afternoon parties a younger woman 
 whose look somehow seemed to win friendli- 
 ness. Finding herself one day descending 
 some of the best white-marble door-steps in 
 company with this agreeable stranger, the 
 elder lady suggested driving her home, and 
 they stepped together into the snug brougham, 
 drawn by a sleek, fat horse, and driven by an 
 equally sleek, fat coachman. 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 39 
 
 ''James, we will drive Mrs. X home," was 
 the only order given. 
 
 The brougham started, and for a period, 
 while its occupants chatted pleasantly, wan- 
 dered somewhat aimlessly through the very 
 best streets. At last its owner, vaguely dis- 
 turbed, said, apologetically: 
 
 "I am afraid James doesn't know where you 
 live. It is annoying; he always knows where 
 everybody lives. I apologize for having to 
 ask such a question, but where do you live, 
 my dear?" 
 
 Her charming companion smiled, and then 
 mentioned a number in North Broad Street — 
 it may even have been Spring Garden Street — 
 an address in the unmentionable regions. The 
 Philadelphian — for we can no longer so desig- 
 nate the younger woman — took the blow gal- 
 lantly. The pleasant chat was resumed, but 
 for at least a quarter of an hour more the 
 sleek, fat horse still ambled aimlessly through 
 the very best district. At last the elder lady 
 rose to the situation. She tapped the glass, 
 and, as the sleek, fat coachman halted, said: 
 
 "I wonder if you would mind telling James 
 yourself where to drive us, dear? I'm afraid 
 he would think it very odd if I myself were 
 to give him an address north of Market 
 Street!" 
 
40 American Towns and People 
 
 The one thing unforgivable in Philadelphia 
 is to be new, to be different from what has 
 been. North Broad Street, for example, may 
 be in every way a better place to live in than 
 Walnut Street, but no one has ever lived there. 
 Hence, no one ever can. The Philadelphian 
 likes to know what to expect; novelty dis- 
 turbs his contentment, ruffles him'. A "society 
 circus," for example, was suggested a few 
 years ago, but given up. "It would be ex- 
 tremely amusing" was the dictum of a social 
 arbiter, "but it would be too new to please 
 Philadelphia." 
 
 A lady once asked why it was that she al- 
 ways saw just the same people at the windows 
 of a certain club. "People! Those are not 
 people," was the gravely ironic reply. "They 
 are painted on the glass of the windows I" It 
 is even possible to imagine this an ideal ar- 
 rangement for a Philadelphia club — that as 
 young men attain the age at which they come 
 into their congenital right to sit at windows 
 the club artist should install their portraits in 
 correct and easy attitudes. 
 
 Of course, the look of the town has perforce 
 changed somewhat with the years; near the 
 center Chicagoesque buildings rudely scrape 
 the serene, exclusive Philadelphian sky. But 
 there are streets and squares in plenty where 
 old red-brick houses with white-marble steps 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 41 
 
 keep affectionate hold upon the past. Only 
 lately some of the quieter byways were util- 
 ized by moving-picture actors for a drama of 
 London life — a most authentic proof of the 
 continuity of the English tradition. Is it fan- 
 tastic to wonder if the day may not soon be 
 here when the British "movies" themselves 
 will be forced to go to Philadelphia to find 
 London streets, unchanged and unvexed by 
 modernization? The link with the Colonial 
 days is never obtrusive in Philadelphia (noth- 
 ing is obtrusive there), but you can still find 
 elderly people who speak of the voyage west- 
 ward from England as "going out" to Amer- 
 ica. Only this year a negro bootblack in a 
 barber-shop spoke of a gentleman's silk hat 
 as a "beaver"! And a mere debutante, a child 
 in white tulle, enthusiastically pro-Allies and 
 pro-English, said this winter that she hoped 
 people now saw what a mistake they made in 
 1776! 
 
 The only thing that can wholly go out of 
 existence in Philadelphia is Philadelphia it- 
 self — if one may venture on paradox. This, 
 some pessimists say, is happening in the tre- 
 mendous exodus to country homes in the fat, 
 well-groomed country that lies correctly along 
 the Main Line. The trolley-cars have made 
 the narrow old streets of the town pande- 
 monium. But the motor arrived just in the 
 
42 American Towns and People 
 
 nick of time to keep country life from being 
 really country life. These so-called country 
 people think nothing of driving twenty miles 
 to town to dine and dance. So, for the time 
 being at least; it is only as if Chestnut, Wal- 
 nut, Spruce, and Pine Streets had been ex- 
 tended into the lovely green suburbs. There 
 their solid elegance and their grave decorum 
 still hold sway, and Philadelphia is still 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 Not even youth prevents a Philadelphian's 
 being Philadelphian. It was a gay young dog 
 who commented upon a painting exhibited 
 at the academy: ^'I don't think it is worth 
 much as a portrait. No Philadelphian ever 
 sat with her legs crossed." And here may be 
 considered boards of censors of moving pic- 
 tures, the newest and most ridiculous gauges 
 of public morality. It is significant that a 
 hero who in other towns had roguishly put a 
 wet head from between the curtains of a 
 shower-bath was not permitted to do so before 
 Philadelphian audiences. The example is 
 taken at random out of probable hundreds. 
 The point is that the note of Philadelphian 
 decorum is strongly struck. 
 
 But Philadelphian decorum requires ex- 
 planation. It derives, of course, partly from 
 the Quaker tradition. But even in the eight- 
 eenth-century days there were what were 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 43 
 
 quaintly called "Wet Quakers," ladles who 
 wickedly wore laces and ribands. And as to 
 Church-of-England circles, it is well to re- 
 member that the funds for the lovely steeple 
 of Christ Church were the product of lot- 
 teries. Even now the town has, as it were, 
 the paradoxical reputation of being both fast 
 and slow. Its inner circles are understood to 
 be committed to friskiness and agreeable dev- 
 ilments of all kinds. But it is also understood 
 that all this liveliness must be kept, as it were, 
 in the family. Misconduct of all descriptions 
 is quite permissible, but only among the well- 
 born and in the hallowed privacy of the home. 
 
 There is, of course, a certain amount of pub- 
 licity even in the best Philadelphian lives. 
 Noblesse oblige. It is, for example, the fash- 
 ion to sip and dance on "opera night" at the 
 restaurant of the newest and smartest hotel. 
 But the care with which the tables are assigned 
 to the well-born, and the decorous, gilded ele- 
 gance of the whole scene, rob the occasion of 
 that welcome vulgarity which elsewhere in 
 the world makes restaurants preferred to 
 homes. 
 
 Whatever may be the vivacity of small, 
 discreet parties given for well-seasoned 
 women of the world, the great balls are al- 
 ways for debutantes, to honor sweet, girlish 
 life iri white muslin and blue ribbons. Here 
 
4-4 American Towns and People 
 
 again the ''Southern note" is evident. It is 
 true that often these innocently aimed func- 
 tions are done upon a scale of splendor which 
 recalls Imperial Rome. To celebrate the en- 
 trance of a young Philadelphian maiden into 
 society orchids bloom, tropic birds warble in 
 expensive jungles, and rare butterflies are re- 
 leased to flutter through one mad night. Such 
 events, duly recorded in the nation's press, are 
 public testimony to the city's wealth, its abil- 
 ity to compete in magnificence and lavishness 
 with the wanton metropolis itself. But hav- 
 ing occasionally during the winter season thus 
 combined civic duty with pleasure, Philadel- 
 phian liveliness resumes its deep, dark flow. 
 
 The natural result of this guarding of gayety 
 like a sacred flame is the Sabbath calm which 
 both traditionally and actually broods over 
 the great city. For the stranger this is most 
 to be noted in the deserted evening streets. 
 Philadelphians will promenade no nocturnal 
 sidewalks. When they venture forth to places 
 of entertainment they scurry as if to cover; 
 and if, upon the return, they stop for supper, 
 they take to restaurants as to the trenches. 
 The town, in short, does not approve of dark- 
 ness — it would take a midnight sun to make 
 midnight popular in Philadelphia. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant thing about the 
 one great Philadelphian revel, the New Year's 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 45 
 
 "Mummers' Parade," is that it takes place at 
 eight in the morning 1 Elsewhere in the coun- 
 try exhausted millions are still faint and wan 
 from the pleasures of the night before, but 
 Philadelphia, having already passed the night 
 in revels, goes forth like a somewhat dissi- 
 pated lark to celebrate a festival of Dionysos 
 at the crack of dawn. Between eight and nine 
 thousand take part, members of various Mum- 
 mers' clubs, "Silver Crown," "Lobster," 
 "Charles Klein," "Sauerkraut Band," "D. D. 
 Oswald," "Zuzu," "Jack Rose Accordion 
 Band," and a dozen other as fantastically 
 named organizations. The amount spent on 
 rich and elaborate costumes runs into the 
 hundreds of thousands. The result is a popu- 
 lar rejoicing both spontaneous and gay. This 
 year the railways began to advertise it, and 
 ran special trains even from New York for it. 
 But even so, it is still true, broadly speaking, 
 that no one outside of Philadelphia has ever 
 heard of it. Why, pray, should any one? 
 Philadelphia would ask. This obscurity is the 
 Philadelphianishness of it — unless you can 
 here also vaguely discern some philosophic 
 truth concerning the wild follies of a quiet 
 community, once the bridle is loosed. 
 
 Of course, in so great a population there are 
 a certain number of graceless pleasure-seek- 
 ers. But in spite of them public amusements 
 
46 American Towns and People 
 
 languish. The characteristic aspect of a 
 Philadelphia theater is gloom until the end of 
 the week comes, when the whole town with its 
 wife or its best girl goes forth for a traditional 
 Saturday night's pleasure. Until then the 
 home holds undisputed sway. 
 
 Indeed, the Philadelphian boasts, or con- 
 fesses, if you prefer the word, that his is a 
 "city of homes." And the ''homes" look very 
 snug, very homelike indeed, especially at dusk 
 as one strolls through the red-brick streets and 
 sees the lamps lit and the curtains drawn upon 
 comfortable, old-fashioned rooms. But the 
 impertinent curiosity of the un-Philadelphian 
 insists on wondering what a Philadelphian 
 home, more accurately and spiritually, is. Is 
 it, for example, devoted to the carpet slipper 
 and the good book? Or is it a center from 
 which radiate moral forces making for pri- 
 vate or public virtue? The foreign observer 
 must reluctantly confess that neither literary 
 and artistic culture nor a high civic standard 
 seems very obviously to be the characteristic 
 Philadelphian note. If people read books in 
 those comfortable homes by those pleasant fire- 
 sides, you somehow suspect that they fall 
 asleep over them. There is, of course, nothing 
 low-bred about Philadelphian ignorance; it 
 is rather like the gay, courteous lack of edu- 
 cation which distinguishes the South. Every 
 
I Who Is a Philadelphian? 47 
 
 one who is any one has learned what might be 
 termed the necessary elegancies — as one learns 
 good table-manners. And it is quite possible 
 
 jthat Shakespeare and Jane Austen — to choose 
 at random — may be better known in Philadel- 
 phia than anywhere else in the country. But 
 passionate and omnivorous general reading 
 there is not. Book-shops are few and far be- 
 
 j tween, libraries are half deserted, and the 
 great university of the state seems to have no 
 integral part in the Philadelphian social 
 structure. 
 
 There is, in consequence, no social obliga- 
 
 i.tion to be cultivated and artistic — as there is 
 to be well-born, well-bred, and well-dressed. 
 Philadelphian good taste can be genuine and 
 
 I modest — a thing not always possible in more 
 self-conscious centers of culture. To take but 
 one example, the town possesses some of the 
 
 , most notable private collections of paintings 
 
 j in the country, but they are, as it were, little 
 known and not much considered in Philadel- 
 phia. The most remarkable — probably the 
 most remarkable in America — for years ex- 
 isted in confused and picturesque superabun- 
 dance in every nook and corner of its owner's 
 dwelling; priceless masterpieces hung about 
 the shaving-stand, stood on the floor by the 
 coal-hod, and, one suspected, lay hidden un- 
 derneath the beds. They were incredibly ill- 
 
48 American Towns and People 
 
 arranged for the visitor — but it was just this 
 that somehow convinced him that they were 
 not primarily intended for his pleasure, but 
 for the owner's own. The fantastic, dusty 
 disorder was a guarantee of the genuine love 
 of beauty which had gathered these treasures, 
 quite unvexed by what the town, streaming in- 
 differently by, would think. Even when 
 Philadelphia paintings are painstakingly and 
 palatially housed, it is still true that one feels 
 that the collecting must have been done for 
 collecting's sake. 
 
 Art is more unconsidered than despised in 
 Philadelphia. Good taste is allowed to grow 
 wild ; it is never actually rooted out. It is true 
 that the local artists huddle together in rather 
 frightened fashion in the artistic and literary 
 clubs in the pleasant, quaint Philadelphian 
 alleys, but this is more a tribute to our ingenu- 
 ous American belief that art can, so to speak, 
 be ''clubbed" into existence, than a real proof 
 that the artists are treated as outcasts. They 
 are merely judged along other lines, and their 
 artistic achievements are no real handicap if 
 they are well-born, well-dressed, and well- 
 bred. 
 
 There have been, perhaps oddly, a consid- 
 erable number of distinguished practitioners 
 of the arts who have originated in Philadel- 
 phia. But they have generally practiced else- 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian?, 49 
 
 where. And having thus transferred their ar- 
 tistic activities to more suitable settings, Phila- 
 delphia warms with a certain pride in them. 
 A portrait-painter who languished at home re- 
 ports that since he moved his studio to New 
 York he spends all his time in Philadelphia 
 executing the commissions he could not secure 
 while domiciled there. 
 
 So long as it can keep Art in its place, the 
 town pays it a certain decent tribute. There 
 has long been an Academy of the Fine Arts, 
 and Miss Agnes Repplier delightfully records 
 that when it first exhibited "imported statues" 
 (plaster copies of those in the Parisian 
 Louvre), one day a week was set apart for la- 
 dies, and the statues were then draped! Now 
 — just to prove that Philadelphia does move — 
 the annual show of paintings is one of the most 
 important in the country. The opening re- 
 ception is of a definite social value (just to 
 show that society is willing to give art a leg 
 up now and then), but it would be considered 
 odd to look at the paintings that evening; in- 
 deed, no one but eccentric, and possibly so- 
 cially doubtful strangers from other cities does 
 so. 
 
 So much for a home-keeping community 
 and art! We may now ask what connection 
 there is between the quiet life and public mo- 
 rality. It is a puzzle to the stranger that the 
 
50 American Towns and People 
 
 peaceful town has so often been politically so 
 corrupt. Indeed, Philadelphia is quite as bad 
 as New York at its Tammany worst; it some- 
 times seems as if it took a quiet pride in being 
 as dishonest as the metropolis, but without any 
 fuss and feathers, any vulgar notoriety in the 
 newspapers. The Philadelphian home is the 
 shrine of comfort and the altar of the graces, 
 but upon it there burns no fierce moral flame. 
 Philadelphia did its duty during the Revolu- 
 tion, but the young ladies had some very 
 pleasant dancing parties with the British offi- 
 cers. To the mind nourished upon terrapin 
 and Madeira there is something not quite 
 good style in enthusiasms, especially grim 
 moral enthusiasms. William Maclay, writ- 
 ing wittily early in the last century, betrays 
 some of these native characteristics in what he 
 means as acid criticism of New England — 
 spiritually the very antipodes of his own town. 
 The Bostonian, so he says, "excludes good hu- 
 mor, affability of conversation, and accommo- 
 dation of temper and sentiment as qualities 
 too vulgar for a gentleman." The Philadel- 
 phian, even when he dies for a cause, must do 
 so "affably"! 
 
 It may seem that such a picture of genial 
 unmorality cannot be an authentic one of the 
 so-called Quaker City. Indeed, it is perhaps 
 astonishing that talk of Quakers and Quaker- 
 
Who Is a Philadelphian? 51 
 
 ishness should have been put off till so late in 
 the Philadelphian discussion. Quakers still 
 exist; there are several prosperous "meetings" 
 in the region, and there are even to be seen 
 Friends who still wear the sober, rich garb of 
 the sect. When charity at home or abroad is 
 asked of the town, these quiet, half-forgotten 
 people come unobtrusively but generously for- 
 ward. To the dim shadows of the Philadel- 
 phia picture they lend a soft, rich color. But 
 somehow to the stranger the Quaker aspect of 
 the town is too shy for capture; the Society of 
 Friends seems only part of its gentle history. 
 Rather, perhaps, they go to make up the larger 
 Philadelphia — the great, industrious, quiet, 
 thrifty town which knows little of genealogy 
 or Madeira, except by hearsay; which con- 
 tains the largest body of skilled artisans in the 
 world, and is the ideal home of the magazines 
 of largest American circulation, the happy, 
 prosperous, unvexed, average American city. 
 With some such thoughts you look out over 
 the long stretches of the great city and see the 
 smoke from ten thousand factory chimneys 
 lightly stain her sky, or watch the majestic 
 Delaware stream by carrying its traffic to the 
 sea. You stop thinking of the Philadelphia 
 of fantastic restrictions and queer codes, and 
 see only the metropolis of the great common- 
 wealth of Pennsylvania. Sometimes on the 
 
52 American Towns and People 
 
 Philadelphian streets you see sturdy young 
 women — with cheeks like scrubbed red apples 
 — wearing the garb of some of the various re- 
 ligious communities which still flourish in the 
 state's rich farm-lands. Rich corn-fields, 
 bursting barns, autumn fruit, all come into the 
 imagination, and you see Philadelphia as an 
 easy-going, unemotional, comfortable, well- 
 fed, but still solid and dependable city. You 
 begin to believe that simple happiness aver- 
 ages high along the red-brick streets and in 
 the far-scattered, trim suburbs. You ask your- 
 self whether contentment, Philadelphia's con- 
 tribution and example to the nation, is not as 
 proud and worthy an achievement as any other 
 of which an American town might boast. 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 
 
 THE most New-Yorkish of ladles, who 
 after an excessively brief, gay winter at 
 home habitually betook herself to the Rivi- 
 era, to London, to Paris, and to the usual 
 spring, summer, and autumn haunts of Eu- 
 ropean elegance, was once asked by an in- 
 telligent and curious foreigner some question 
 concerning the habits and customs of her com- 
 patriots. She paused, meditated prettily, and 
 then made what, for the purposes of the pres- 
 ent discussion of her native town, is a pro- 
 foundly significant reply. 
 
 "I'm not sure," she said, "that I'm the best 
 person to ask. You see I'm a New-Yorker and 
 I know so few Americans!" 
 
 The anecdote — authentic, as all anecdotes 
 should be — expresses with a nice exaggeration 
 what sometimes seems to be New York's pre- 
 carious position upon the edge of the North 
 American continent. 
 
 New York knows very little about America ; 
 
 indeed, it thinks it more suitable that America 
 
 should know something about New York; it 
 
 53 
 
54 American Towns and People 
 
 has visited the pleasure resorts of the Eastern 
 slope, it has been to Washington; it has spent 
 the spring in Florida, and has discovered that 
 California is delightful, expensive, and not 
 too "American." But the vague stretches of 
 the great middle-Westernland are, so it 
 imagines, peopled by dull creatures, speak- 
 ing roughly and not knowing pleasure. With 
 great tranquillity New York assumes that it 
 is the most habitable place in the country. 
 And it hears calmly that it is "foreign." 
 
 It is the privilege of all American cities to 
 sustain a large foreign population. But the 
 metropolis is so accessible from Ellis Island 
 that its foreigners are not only numerous, but 
 have the bloom still on. They exhibit a re- 
 luctance to go farther. Associations are 
 formed abroad and government agents come 
 here for the purpose of inducing immigrants 
 to "move on." It may be because the foreign- 
 ers' unwillingness to live anywhere but in New 
 York seems so natural and forgivable that 
 New-Yorkers welcome the visitors, and assign 
 to them large parts of the town. Aliens exist 
 not only in the slums, but in Fifth Avenue; in- 
 deed they are so frequent in the best society 
 that almost every fashionable New York lady, 
 so it is said, now has a pet foreigner. 
 
 Foreigners do not seem strange in New 
 York; they belong there. On a spring after- 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 55 
 
 noon not long ago there was to be seen near 
 the lovely white-marble Tower of Babel in 
 Madison Square an odd-looking, long-haired, 
 bareheaded, barefooted, natural-bearded man 
 dressed in a single dirty white wool garment, 
 an apostle of simple living, who was remem- 
 bered by one observer as spreading his frowzy 
 gospel five years earlier on a Swiss steamboat. 
 The point is that in New York he excited less 
 comment and seemed more at home than he 
 had seemed at home. And so, to the New York 
 eye, seem the Cubans at the hotels, the Argen- 
 tines at the cabarets, the Italians in the gallery 
 at the opera, the Hungarians at sidewalk cafes 
 in Second Avenue, the Yiddish actors on the 
 Bowery, and so on through the long romantic 
 catalogue of the town. Goulash and chop 
 suey and spaghetti are no stranger than pie to 
 the American New-Yorker; he has made his 
 culinary tour du monde within the limits of 
 his own island. He might well seem, to the 
 more deeply indigenous visitor from the Miss- 
 issippi Valley, as foreign as the foreigner. 
 
 Even were there no aliens in the town, salt- 
 water laps on every side of it, and there is a 
 fair seaway to the four corners of the globe. 
 When the docks and liners with steam up lie 
 little farther away than the railway stations, 
 it is — or was — literally simpler for a New- 
 Yorker to go abroad than to — shall we say 
 
56 American Towns and People 
 
 Bar Harbor? It is quite easy to feel that the 
 Battery is half-way to Europe — a famous old 
 London actor, while he was playing in Broad- 
 way, used to go every Saturday morning to the 
 green park at the town's tip-end and watch 
 the steamers go through the Narrows to Eng- 
 land ; it softened his feeling of being far away. 
 The noble harbor into which the Hudson 
 streams is our chief gateway to the Atlantic, 
 and though few New-Yorkers lounge along 
 the waterside, they inhabit, for all that, a 
 great port of the sea, and their natural herit- 
 age is easy access to foreign lands. Whether 
 or not, according to statistics, New-Yorkers 
 travel more than other Americans is beside 
 the point; actually and naturally more ties and 
 interests and memories and hopes bind them 
 to the transatlantic world. Philadelphia and 
 Boston may lie upon some traditional and 
 spiritual promontory nearer England, but 
 New York is closer to the whole of Europe. 
 Your head-waiter is just back from France, 
 your bootblack's cousin has been arrested at 
 Athens and your friend at the club has had 
 a letter from his sister who, married to an 
 Englishman, is now at Salonica. There is no 
 doubt that New York faces east. It feels it- 
 self at once our ambassador to Europe and 
 our reception committee to the visiting for- 
 eigner. 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 57 
 
 The first months of war made it exceed- 
 ingly clear to the philosophical observer that 
 American interests in European events varied 
 directly as the distance from New York. By 
 this, of course, it is not meant that everywhere 
 in the land the European cataclysm did not 
 stir to somber, even tragic, pity. But it was 
 in New York, at least during that first year, 
 that crowds stood and debated about the bulle- 
 tin-boards all through the night, and that war 
 hung heaviest in the overcharged and sultry 
 air. The tenseness grew less even two hours 
 away — a visitor to Philadelphia that winter 
 found for four days in one week no war news 
 on the first page of his morning paper, a thing 
 inconceivable in New York. The over- 
 wrought metropolis, indeed, exaggerated the 
 indifference to the European event reported 
 to exist elsewhere, and asserted that in the re- 
 mote West Americans had not heard the guns 
 in Belgium, did not even know there was a 
 war. New York was then almost inclined to 
 make a merit of its foreignness. Relief funds, 
 administered in Wall Street, were generously 
 aided from the local purse, with a unity of 
 effort which the great town does not often lend 
 to domestic good works; foreignness took on 
 a look both interesting and gallant. 
 
 But foreignness, especially in the antebel- 
 lum years, was a term synonymous with un- 
 
^8 American Towns and People 
 
 Americanism; it was an accusation brought 
 against the metropolis by almost the whole 
 country. The visitor to our shores is button- 
 holed in the corridor of his New York hotel 
 by the emissaries of the regions west of the 
 Alleghanies and warned that New York is 
 not American, but wholly foreign. Such dark 
 hints are of course excessively confusing to 
 the foreigner, who has never in his life seen 
 anything less like his native land than New 
 York. In his hotel his very bedroom has ter- 
 rified him with its necessity for confiding his 
 most intimate needs to an impersonal tele- 
 phone in the wall instead of to a waiter or a 
 chambermaid. Below, in the gigantic gilded 
 corridors, a strange mob surges to and fro; in 
 the bar lurk unknown and insidious drinks; 
 and in the restaurant strange dishes like soft- 
 shell crabs, the technique of eating which is 
 totally a matter of conjecture and experiment. 
 Outside the town suggests that it is subject 
 to frequent earthquakes or bombardments. 
 Elevated trains shoot above his head, at his 
 feet chasms yawn and bombs explode. In the 
 rare parts of the town which seem at all fin- 
 ished, white towers scrape the high, pale sky, 
 and marble palaces quite unlike any com- 
 mercial constructions he knows line the 
 crowded avenue. As for the regions dedi- 
 cated to theatrical and other nocturnal pleas- 
 
The park affords charming vistas of the ciiy beyond. 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 59 
 
 ures, they blaze barbarically with lights and 
 have the air of being quite temporarily im- 
 provised. New York must present to his star- 
 tled alien eye the appearance of an extrava- 
 gantly rich mining-camp, where the loot of 
 European luxury is being offered to hetero- 
 geneous myriads, many of whom, with their 
 nuggets and dust in their belts, are there avow- 
 edly to ''shoot up the town." 
 
 The presence, in protected corners, of 
 French chefs and head-waiters known in Lon- 
 don, or even, in one of the rougher streets of 
 shacks, of the most expensive Italian opera 
 in the world, will never persuade the intelli- 
 gent foreigner that this is Europe. And we 
 ourselves will do well to consider his point 
 of view. In this sense of being a mere con- 
 fused shifting camp or fair, of being perma- 
 nently the least permanent place in the world, 
 New York is the newest, freshest, most 
 American of our cities. It is sometimes al- 
 leged that modern steel construction is making 
 it difficult to tear the town down every night 
 and rebuild it every morning, but this is mere 
 optimism. New York is experimental in its 
 vague polyglot spendthrift inability to find 
 out just what it really is. 
 
 Philadelphia and Boston, besides a credit- 
 able to-day, still bear the evidences of an hon- 
 orable yesterday; and Chicago, to take that 
 
6o American Towns and People 
 
 great city as typical of trans-Alleghany Ameri- 
 canism, already shows not merely her present, 
 but the concrete, clean-cut, self-conscious, de- 
 liberate outlines of a future. They have, all 
 of them, a more highly flavored local quality, 
 a more definite personality. New York does 
 its best to forget its past and to be careless 
 of its future. It has amazingly little civic 
 conscience. Of course the speculators in real 
 estate and the politicians force the town to 
 build subways and give such hostages to for- 
 tune, but one sometimes feels that New York 
 is willing to engage in, these constructions 
 mainly because it likes the noise and gains 
 from the attendant discomfort an agreeable, 
 lively sense that something is happening. The 
 metropolis is a lusty young giant, yelling and 
 shouting, building and pulling down, and 
 gayly tossing about an excess of expensive and 
 lovely toys. It is difficult to say what New 
 York is or will be, because it already is, and 
 probably will be a little of everything. It 
 is monstrously big and inconceivably vigorous. 
 It is our one great city in that it is almost 
 a microcosm of the world. But though it may 
 contain everything foreign that there is in Eu- 
 rope, Asia, and Africa, it is still, everything 
 summed up, not foreign. It is not America, 
 but it is very American. 
 
 None of our great towns has anything com- 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 61 
 
 parable to New York's "floating population" 
 — does the phrase not suggest agreeable ques- 
 tions as to what they float upon? There are 
 never enough hotels to accommodate the ar- 
 rivals; cut a hole in any New York wall on 
 almost any street, hang a hotel sign above it, 
 and you will find that a stream of patrons 
 mechanically begins to pass through it and 
 ''register." The openings of the great hotels 
 of the metropolis are national events, and their 
 characteristics are subjects for enlightened 
 discussion in the remotest hamlets of the land. 
 It was not so very long ago that one of them 
 had neat attendants in uniform, with "Guide" 
 in gold lettering upon their caps, whose whole 
 duty was to conduct visitors from afar through 
 the huge new pile. Troops of visitors there 
 were. It may reasonably be doubted whether 
 they found time during their stay in New 
 York to visit the Metropolitan Museum of 
 Fine Arts, but they gravely inspected what 
 was to them both more interesting and more 
 important. 
 
 The luxury, confusion, the gigantic scale of 
 these establishments, and the high degree of 
 their organization are almost beyond descrip- 
 tion. It was lately asserted that at any one of 
 the newest and most extravagant the jewels 
 stolen from guests' apartments mounted regu- 
 larly to twenty-five hundred dollars' worth 
 
62 American Towns and People 
 
 a week, and it was gravely suggested that so 
 well run was one hotel in particular that the 
 stealing there was probably done by the ho- 
 tel's own well-drilled band of thieves, who 
 could, by arrangement with chambermaids 
 and watchmen, see their patrons were as 
 little disturbed as possible while suffering the 
 inevitable slight losses. At any rate, it is ob- 
 vious that in the New York atmosphere of 
 extravagance such losses are no more than flea- 
 bites were in the humbler, old-fashioned hos- 
 telries of our grandfathers. 
 
 Everjrwhere through New York the float- 
 ing population may be observed floating. In 
 certain parts of the town and in certain moods 
 it seems out of the question that there should 
 be such a thing as a resident population. It 
 is in fact a favorite statement that the night 
 restaurants and the cabarets and the roof-gar- 
 den "shows" are only visited by out-of-town 
 people. It may be stated flatly that this is 
 wholly untrue and a most unfair attempt to 
 shift the blame. New York has in certain as- 
 pects its own distinction and its own sober 
 merits, but it must be admitted that among all 
 our towns it excels in exuberant, unabashed, 
 and vulgar pleasure-seeking. And this is not 
 wholly to the credit (or discredit) of the 
 floating population. The taste for "floating" 
 most notably exists among the fixed inhabi- 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 63 
 
 tants. The cabarets may possibly not be habit- 
 ually visited by old ladies descended from the 
 Knickerbocker families, by professors of- Co- 
 lumbia University, by lodgers at either the 
 Martha Washington or the Mills Hotels, by 
 ministers of the gospel, or by curators of the 
 Natural History Museum, to pick at random 
 among admirable existing types, but they are 
 frequented by some millions of New-Yorkers. 
 The metropolis does not adapt its tastes to 
 those of its out-of-town visitors. They would 
 not wish that it should. They have not come 
 to the metropolis for "home cooking" in any 
 conceivable or figurative meaning of that 
 phrase. They are there to enjoy themselves 
 New-Yorkishly, and proudly to carry the gos- 
 pel and the technique of pleasure back to the 
 waste places of the country. 
 
 New York has from Revolutionary times 
 accepted with equanimity the role of Siren 
 City; indeed, she expects novelists and play- 
 wrights to portray the dangers which lurk 
 within her bosom for pure young men and 
 women from the country. Boston and Phila- 
 delphia are. Heaven knows, not free from evil, 
 but there is something faintly ridiculous in 
 the idea of their luring men to destruction. 
 On the other hand, the novel or play upon 
 these lines dealing with Chicago is expected 
 to flatter that city as it does New York. Chi- 
 
64 American Towns and People 
 
 cago is remote enough to be independent oi: 
 New York, even in its vices. 
 
 New York is notably at ease with pleas- 
 ure. The habits and customs of pleasure-seek- 
 ing are widely diffused, are not the property; 
 of the so-called upper classes. For example, 
 every one dines at restaurants in New York, 
 and as night falls probably more people are 
 simultaneously in evening-dress than in any 
 other city in the country. There is here no 
 wish to fall into the common vulgarity of at- 
 taching a semi-sacred character to the "swal- 
 low-tail," but its habitual employment is 
 symptomatic. The easiest way to judge to 
 what extent a town "dresses for dinner" is to 
 notice how many men may be observed walk- 
 ing in such attire or patronizing the street- 
 cars, for, unquestionably, there are American 
 cities where males so clad have a guilty and 
 hunted look and only venture forth in "hacks." 
 Therefore, the way the Fifth Avenue side- 
 walks and the Madison Avenue cars blossom 
 forth with top-hats and white ties on a pleas- 
 ant evening is significant. More than else- 
 where, too, is New York evening-dress merely 
 what one wears in the evening, not a garb 
 necessarily reserved for occasions and places 
 of supreme elegance. Persons in such attire 
 may, for example, often be seen supping, with- 
 out fear or self-consciousness and for fifteen 
 
What Is a New-Yorker^ 65 
 
 cents, in the famous excellent but cheap white- 
 tiled Childs' restaurants. 
 
 And the habit of carrying a cane, fantastic 
 though the assertion may seem, might be made 
 the basis of a philosophical differentiation of 
 our various cities. A New-Yorker really 
 bears a walking-stick in blithe unconsciousness 
 that he is doing anything unusual. But a Bos- 
 ton gentleman of the very highest rank re- 
 cently seriously envied a New York friend 
 who sustained himself with a cherry stick dur- 
 ing business hours. And it is not so many 
 years ago that a credulous new arrival in Chi- 
 cago was gravely warned that an attempt to 
 carry a morning cane down Dearborn Street 
 might result in physical violence. 
 
 Perhaps the chief impression which the 
 metropolis makes is of the vivacity of its life. 
 It is the completest expression of our national 
 jote de vivre. And it is pleasant to record that 
 for the most characteristic moment of this 
 quality you would not cite Broadway at night, 
 but Fifth Avenue by day. The sparkle of 
 this famous street is perhaps largely due to 
 the New York climate. Climates are never 
 perfect, but among the world's great cities the 
 American metropolis is singularly fortunate. 
 It is flooded with sunlight, and on its best days 
 the air has a crisp and tonic quality. By a 
 tacit understanding, ill-dressed and sad peo- 
 
66 American Towns and People 
 
 pie keep off Fifth Avenue. On a bright morn- 
 ing there is no resisting the street's gay intoxi- 
 cation. The most expensive shops in the 
 world are close at hand, the best restaurants 
 near by. Brave men lounge at the w^indows 
 of exclusive clubs, and fair women cut cou- 
 pons at fashionable banks. Life seems indeed 
 w^orth living. The whole town is gay. Even 
 children and nurse-maids in the Park seem 
 more engagingly clean and innocent and spir- 
 ited than elsewhere, as if they, too, felt the 
 call of happiness. It is worth while noting 
 the clearness of much of New York's air, 
 doing justice to the clean and simple liveliness 
 of much of its enjoyment, because its prom- 
 inence as one of the world's chief centers of 
 dissipation and pleasure-seeking has done its 
 reputation bad service with many people of 
 virtue and good taste. 
 
 So much may be respectfully submitted in 
 New York's defense, that if a town sets out 
 to be gay there is a certain merit in being gay. 
 To the deeper consideration of this proposi- 
 tion every one is invited to bring whatever 
 degree of toleration and philosophy life has 
 taught him. It is certain, however, that just 
 where New York is most obviously alluring, 
 it is also most obviously hard, vulgar, tawdry, 
 and repellent. There is possibly no city iji 
 the world where such an exhibition could pass 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 67 
 
 without protest as enlivened the hours of 2 
 A.M. during New York's second winter of the 
 war. While, to the imagination, the guns 
 about Verdun boomed, the young ladies of 
 the chorus, who had already exhibited them- 
 selves in and out of a series of satisfactorily 
 indecent costumes, came forth, for the climax 
 of the night's pleasure, dressed as Red Cross 
 nurses, and kicked the ruffles of their under- 
 wear into the faces of the half-intoxicated 
 occupants of the first row of tables. It is at 
 such moments that you must think hard of 
 the vastness of New York, of the variety of 
 its inhabitants and the multiplicity of its inter- 
 ests. You must try to believe that by 2 A.M. 
 some God-fearing people are already in bed 
 and that others may be reading a good book. 
 You must think that, besides roof-gardens, 
 there are theaters crowded for Shakespearian 
 revivals and concert-halls jammed with lov- 
 ers of Beethoven. You must not forget that 
 great institutions of learning crown the city's 
 rocky heights, and that hospitals dot its lower 
 levels. You must remember that there are 
 not only the idle rich, but the industrious poor. 
 You must again see dark processions of the 
 unemployed marching somberly up the glitter 
 of Fifth Avenue. You must hear ringing 
 in your ears the orations of the social revolu- 
 tion delivered at the feet of Lincoln in Union 
 
68 American Towns and People 
 
 Square, as well as the prattle of lovely ladies 
 in Louis XVI. drawing-rooms who coquet 
 with new doctrines as they did in France be- 
 fore the Bastille fell. You must think that 
 not only do simple, rich. Western millionaires 
 migrate to the metropolis, but lads from an 
 older world with their worldly possessions in 
 a handkerchief, to whom, down the bay, Lib- 
 erty seems to offer a welcome and the hazard 
 of new fortunes. You must consider while the 
 lights burn so bright that it is hard to be the 
 richest city in the world and always to keep 
 your head on straight. 
 
 After the town's exuberant vitality, its over- 
 flowing wealth is its most striking character- 
 istic. Wealth's own special enemy, Mr. Con- 
 gressman Walsh, is authority for the state- 
 ment that ninety-two per cent, of America's 
 money is in the metropolis. Wall Street, now 
 the world's financial center, collects money, 
 and, besides, the continued immigration of the 
 rich from all over the country brings gold to 
 New York as water to a sink-hole. New 
 York is the only place any one migrates to, 
 with the exception of Washington. No one 
 since Benjamin Franklin has ever moved to 
 Philadelphia, and, with the exception of some 
 few who brought a special literary baggage, 
 no one has ever "settled" in Boston. Chicago 
 has a few accessions from what might be 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 69 
 
 termed the Chicagoan province, but, after all, 
 Chicago to so many of its indigenous inhabi- 
 tants is a way-station on the road. In New 
 York, on the contrary, almost the hardest thing 
 to find is a born New-Yorker. You may 
 come to New York with the highest social 
 ambitions, or you may aspire to nothing be- 
 yond calling the leading head-waiters by their 
 first names, but you believe there is a place 
 for you and your money on Manhattan Island. 
 So, year by year, the golden stream rises 
 higher. Only by the most constant and care- 
 ful extravagance can New York keep it from 
 bursting its banks. 
 
 It might be thought that there were tradi- 
 tions and historical examples enough of how 
 to sp^d. But when you consider the world's 
 long history you find that money, in the lavish 
 abundance we now know, existed in imperial 
 Rome and wept out with it. It was re-in- 
 vented in Perif, and, even if you come straight 
 down to the nineteenth century, they were rich 
 in Havana before they were in New York. 
 The present fabulous riches have come within 
 the memory of the present generation, and 
 the problem of spending is actually a fresh 
 one, which New York is gallantly trying to 
 solve. 
 
 It was long ago discovered that merely to 
 build a large, costly house upon an expensive 
 
JO American Towns and People 
 
 site was too simple to be the way out of the 
 difficulty — how often in our smaller Ameri- 
 can towns have we seen the innocent local mil- 
 lionaire construct an expensive stone "home" 
 and then live in it with two Swedish girls 
 as "help." Many of the richest people in New 
 York live in quite small houses; there are 
 other ways — such as changing the drawing- 
 room flowers three times daily, or having a 
 decent valet for your chauffeurs — of making 
 the money fly. It is just the growth of luxu- 
 rious detail in New York wliich makes the in- 
 vestigation of the great city so profitable to 
 students from the provinces. The lady, for 
 example, who gives a quiet little party of six 
 to dine and go to the play and has bought 
 boxes at three different theaters, so that her 
 guests may choose whichever suits their post- 
 prandial mood, strikes the New York note 
 with beautiful clearness. And the gentleman 
 who, in a fit of half-amused exasperation that 
 his favorite motor-car was being used one 
 morning to convey his wife's canary to the 
 bird-doctor, sent home that afternoon a smaller 
 car for the exclusive use of the feathered mem- 
 bers of his household, is either a New-Yorker 
 or soon will be. There is, too, the imperial 
 gesture, as when lately for a debutantes' ball 
 special trains were sent to convey male youth 
 and beauty from the three great colleges. 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? ji 
 
 And, as intelligence has grown the vogue of 
 recent years even in New York, some people 
 find it pleasant to keep a pet weekly paper or 
 a tame theater or an opera. 
 
 The habit of extravagance pervades the 
 whole New York community. The shop-girl 
 may have but one dress, but it is in the latest 
 style. No one is ever more than two weeks 
 behind the fashion in New York. People do 
 not regulate their expenditures according to 
 their incomes; they regulate their incomes ac- 
 cording to their expenditures, or try to. An 
 extra cylinder in the motor means an extra 
 hour in Wall Street, that is all. Life is so 
 full, so free, that it seems almost ill-natured 
 to be poor in New York. 
 
 The moment has probably come in what 
 is hoped is already a glittering picture of the 
 metropolis to speak of "society," noting first, 
 however, that nowhere but in a large city like 
 New York is the life of those not "in society" 
 so full of possibilities of rational or irrational 
 enjoyment. It is beside the point to inquire 
 whether fashionable New York would like to 
 conduct its activities in anything like decent 
 privacy — it has no such chance. It is the vic- 
 tim of our national passion for newspapers. 
 It is, of course, permissible to suspect that the 
 town is so large that even the most highly 
 placed can secure moments of incognito^ and 
 
72 American Towns and People 
 
 that a metropolitan gossip can never know all 
 her neighbors' news. But if you were to judge 
 merely from the press, there is no one in West 
 Podunk or Bird Center who cannot accurately 
 follow the daily and nightly movements of 
 New York's crowned heads. In the metropo- 
 lis itself plebeian intimacy with royalty goes 
 even further. Two occupants of orchestra 
 seats at the opera, possibly leading "buyers" 
 for a high-class department-store, were lately 
 overheard commenting upon the ornaments 
 of the boxes. They viewed with especial 
 pleasure a famous lady in white satin, the 
 more exposed portions of whom were covered 
 with the loveliest pearls. 
 
 "Yes, Mrs. X. is looking wonderful to-night. 
 And I think it's so nice that every one here 
 knows she is such a good mother!" 
 
 Is this not an agreeable side of democracy? 
 
 The legend has grown up and is believed, 
 even in New York, that there is an extra poig- 
 nant flavor to the fashionableness of New 
 York's fashion, a more glittering pinnacle 
 there upon which the favored few lightly 
 balance. New York envies no other fashion- 
 ableness, and though this is offensive to other 
 cities, it gives a delightful serenity to New 
 York life itself. 
 
 Romantic writers for the Sunday supple- 
 ments talk of New York's old families, and 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 73 
 
 indeed it is said that obscure people still exist 
 who were in society before the 'seventies of 
 the last century. But you might hear more 
 talk in Chicago of old families than in New 
 York, and with reason, for it is quite possible 
 that the reigning powers of the Western me- 
 tropolis have been the longer established. 
 People in New York may have maiden aunts 
 living in the Stuyvesant Square region, but 
 they visit them privately; the stranger may 
 perhaps see these nice old ladies in caps at 
 sunny windows where canary-birds hang, but 
 he will find no one lunching at the Ritz who 
 can introduce him to them. Indeed, the legen- 
 dary Dutch connection is chiefly useful in ex- 
 cusing the stolidity of well-born young men. 
 New York is socially as fresh as paint and as 
 bright as several new dollars. 
 
 The newspaper readers have all been told 
 that the one requisite for being very much *4n 
 society" in New York is to be very rich. And 
 the view finds support, it is said, inside the 
 charmed circle itself. At an evening party 
 with song-birds from the Metropolitan one of 
 the proudest queens left in the middle of the 
 program. A rival, whose dislike of music 
 was equally genuine, rose to follow her, but 
 was detained by the gentleman by her side, 
 himself a wit and a noted arbiter of the ele- 
 gancies. 
 
74 American Towns and People 
 
 "No, my dear lady," he said, "you aren't 
 rich enough to leave early. Mrs. A. has ten 
 times your money — it's all right for her, but 
 you must be polite and stay till the end!" 
 
 We may assume, without further discussion, 
 that wealth receives its due consideration in 
 New York's highest circles. And yet, very 
 rich people not in society are much commoner 
 and much more characteristic in the metropo- 
 lis than rich people in it. The gentlemen with 
 megaphones on the Seeing-New-York wagons 
 may know who inhabit all the Fifth Avenue 
 palaces; nobody else knows. The fabled 
 street of fashion is now largely peopled by the 
 unknown rich. The hotels and apartment- 
 houses are infested with them. Some of them 
 belong in New York, others have migrated 
 there — moths tempted by the great metropoli- 
 tan adventure. But, somehow, for all the ac- 
 tivity of their movements, they carry with 
 them a hint of loneliness. It is a sheer physi- 
 cal impossibility for any social structure to ac- 
 commodate them all. They are condemned to 
 minor circles, to eternal shopping, to theater- 
 going, and to overeating in the restaurants. 
 
 Indeed, a situation quite unexampled in 
 all history has arisen in New York. There is 
 so much money that there is danger of its 
 coming to be almost a drug on the market. 
 Rich people do not always even attain to the 
 
Vast aqueducts cf traffic span the sky. 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? 75 
 
 honor of being excluded ; they are more often 
 not even known. Is it possible that our great 
 national malady, wealth, carries somewhere 
 within it its own antidote? Even now there 
 are optimistic New-Yorkers who, while they 
 admit that there must always be in society 
 plenty of people whose money will grease the 
 wheels, allege that already achievement, 
 beauty, intelligence, charm, and wit are in 
 active demand. 
 
 If not in demand in "society," it is fairly 
 certain that they are wanted somewhere in 
 the vast city. New York probably ofifers op- 
 portunity to a greater variety of individual 
 social tastes than any American town. It is a 
 metropolis, if not a capital. But, unhappily, 
 in the latter phrase there lies a sting. If 
 Washington could only be rolled into the 
 larger town there would exist a New York 
 which could definitely challenge comparison 
 with London or Paris. But so long as the na- 
 tion's affairs are transacted in the District of 
 Columbia, New York has uneasy moments 
 of haunting doubt as to whether it is not, after 
 all, a mere settlement of Wall Street brokers 
 and young actresses. The winter excursion to 
 Washington has become an almost necessary 
 adjunct to the New York winter. And the so- 
 cial opportunities of the capital are spoken 
 of in almost hushed tones by those who would 
 
76 American Towns and People 
 
 dismiss Philadelphia and Boston with a laugh. 
 It is a confession by the confused and shape- 
 less metropolis of social incompleteness. 
 
 Now self-consciously to remedy social in- 
 completeness is a trait racy of our American 
 soil. The process, always going on, is what 
 gives perpetually the tingling, exciting sense 
 that we are a new country. New York, to take 
 but one example, is big and rich and varied 
 enough to offer some sort of natural and secure 
 and tranquil perch for Art. But the town is 
 so persuaded that Art is an essential part of 
 a creditable metropolitan existence that Art is 
 always being chivvied to and fro by organiza- 
 tions determined to uplift it and individuals 
 sworn to be Bohemian at any cost. Already in 
 many respectable circles every one has once 
 met a painter, knows a writer, or calls an actor 
 by his Christian name. 
 
 And this is but one more stroke in the de- 
 sired picture of confusion and flux and change 
 which is the portrait of New York. The town 
 is a mere experimental laboratory. In Bos- 
 ton and Philadelphia you can know who's who 
 and what's what. And after a certain ac- 
 quaintance with those cities you can fairly pre- 
 cisely estimate their resources. New York is 
 a grab-bag in a booth at the World's Fair, 
 but there is nothing you may not hope to pull 
 from its depths. Its human structure, to 
 
What Is a New-Yorker? JJ 
 
 change the metaphor, is as impermanent as 
 its physical. It would be a joke to talk of a 
 settled and well-regulated society in such a 
 place. An exclusive dancing-class or an as- 
 sembly ball would be grotesque. Everything 
 and everybody are in the melting-pot in New 
 York. And though New York is still far from 
 the social liquid condition which obtains in 
 great towns abroad, there are reasons to hope 
 that some day, when the mixing process has 
 gone further and it is more nearly possible 
 for any New Yorker to know all New York, 
 the metropolis will be one of the most interest- 
 ing, stimulating, and pleasant places in the 
 world to inhabit. 
 
 It is already, from the American point of 
 view, the most exciting and preoccupying. 
 There is no one who does not go to New 
 York, no one whom fate might not send there 
 to live. Of course, no writer can be so de- 
 luded as to think that he only can strip the 
 veil from the metropolis — seven times seven 
 veils are daily torn from it in every magazine 
 and newspaper in the country. Nothing new 
 can be said about it. And all can never be 
 said. The best that is to be hoped Is that what- 
 ever may be thought or recorded about the 
 American metropolis will derive some interest 
 from the subject — for New York, for better 
 or for worse, is our great national interest. 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 
 
 THE final insult to a Chicagoan is to recog- 
 nize his town after any absence from it. 
 A certain writer, planning to do a certain 
 article on Chicago, was remonstrated with by 
 a lady from that metropolis. 
 
 "I don't see," she remarked, "how you can 
 expect to give an accurate picture of the town, 
 and to do it justice; you haven't been there 
 since January." 
 
 This conversation, taking place in April, 
 gives some measure of the rapidity with which, 
 in the opinion of its inhabitants, Chicago 
 changes. For them, who know so well that 
 each moment of Chicago history has always 
 brought improvement, and always will, it is 
 small wonder that the golden moment for 
 writing definitely of their town never quite 
 arrives, and that the real Chicago is always 
 a little in the future. 
 
 Indeed, there is almost nothing in the way 
 of change which the Chicagoan may not, with 
 some show of reason, hope for. There is one 
 supreme symbol of the town's accomplish- 
 ment; now that the Chicago River, so long a 
 
 79 
 
8o American Towns and People 
 
 foul and unspeakable stream, has been mirac- 
 ulously reversed in its course, and flows inland 
 toward the Mississippi in a clear blue flood 
 from Lake Michigan's heart, it must be ad- 
 mitted instantly that a city which has wrought 
 this hydraulic wonder is capable of effecting 
 any transformation which its imagination can 
 conceive. 
 
 Here, at the outset of the Chicagoan discus- 
 sion, is what one might call the theme which 
 runs through all its Western music. Chicago 
 is what all American towns theoretically 
 should be — self-made. It did not just grow, 
 like Topsy and New York and Philadelphia 
 and Boston, but it is the product of constant 
 and bitter effort. Looking at a map to-day and 
 observing the magnificent convergence of all 
 the railways and all the steamship lines of the 
 great Middle-Western country upon the south- 
 ern shore of Lake Michigan, it is easy to be- 
 lieve that Chicago's destiny was always mani- 
 fest. But it cannot have been so evident to 
 those early settlers. The town was built in a 
 morass bordering a sluggish, sullen stream, 
 swept alternately by bitter winter gales and 
 scorching dust-laden summer blasts from a 
 hot prairie. For months a blanket of driz- 
 zling clouds obscured the sun. Chicago has 
 been described by one of its favorite sons as 
 "having no climate of its own, but being 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 8l 
 
 exposed to the incursions of all the cli- 
 mates there are." Of course in these incur- 
 sions must be included rare days of perfect 
 weather, when the beauty of the town's loca- 
 tion by its great blue lake is very moving. 
 But the rule still holds that, though Chicago 
 has a great deal of climate, most of it is bad. 
 
 The river has been turned back, and 
 (though the sky-scrapers must be built on 
 piles driven in the water-logged earth) the 
 mud in the down-town streets is a thing of the 
 past; but Chicago has as yet discovered noth- 
 ing which can alter the essential quality of the 
 climate of three-quarters of its year. Exist- 
 ence there seems predestined to be a struggle 
 against nature and the powers of darkness. 
 The town's whole history has a grotesque, 
 passionate epic quality. The old Chicago was 
 a smoking furnace, a seething caldron. From 
 the windows of a train creeping into it in the 
 murk and mists of the early morning the vast, 
 straggling suburbs, the belching chimneys on 
 remote, isolated islands in a grimy prairie sea 
 had something sinister and portentous in them. 
 Any sweetness and light in Chicago must have 
 been paid for, you feel, with tears and blood. 
 But the town's gallant inhabitants have al- 
 ways been ready to pay that price, and more, 
 for progress. In the spacious elegance of 
 Michigan Boulevard, where on one hand a 
 
82 ^American Towns and People 
 
 symphony orchestra plays and operatic sing- 
 ers carol, and on the other untold thousands 
 of students, male and female, ply all the love- 
 ' liest arts in marble halls, you feel invigorated 
 and cheered by Chicago's success in being a 
 fully equipped center of civilization, whatever 
 the odds against it may have been. Here is, 
 indeed, the authentic and traditional Ameri- 
 canism which since the Civil War has some- 
 what faded from sight along the Atlantic sea- 
 board, where great and rich cities are only 
 too apt to let not only luxury and the arts, but 
 civic pride and responsibility, too, come as 
 they will. Here is the reason for the state- 
 ments so often flung by Chicago in the face 
 of its Eastern rivals, that it alone is the great 
 American city. It has its foreign population 
 in heterogeneous hordes, and its quarters of 
 the town where alien languages prevail, but to 
 some extent it has kept the early American 
 digestion of immigrants ; it assimilates a tough, 
 trans-oceanic diet and makes of its inhabitants, 
 if not Americans, at least Chicagoans. 
 
 Civic pride is the real Chicago passion — 
 pride in whatever achievement has been made, 
 and pride in the sacrifices entailed by what- 
 ever achievement remains to be made. Never, 
 it may be presumed, in the history of the world 
 have its inhabitants done so much for a town 
 in so short a time. The whole structure of 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 83 
 
 civic, artistic, and charitable institutions has 
 been created by a few generations, who had 
 faith in their chosen home and a gesture at 
 once broad and imaginative. 
 
 Almost the first of American cities, Chi- 
 cago erected huge buildings, planned great 
 boulevards, and laid out a spacious park sys- 
 tem. It suddenly built a university, from 
 the beginning almost the largest in the world, 
 covering a great waste tract with academic 
 halls and cloisters. It put huge bathing estab- 
 lishments in its parks by its blue lake, so that 
 during happy summer days the poorest Chi- 
 cagoan might find his city the ideal vacation 
 resort. It set fountains, pools, and sunken 
 gardens around great factories and mail-order 
 houses, so that some refreshing breath of art 
 might come to the humblest worker. The 
 catalogue of its achievements is tremendous. 
 Indeed, there is an optimism in its lake breezes 
 which makes even the most reluctant Easterner 
 believe that if everything in Chicago is not 
 perfection it is only because there has not yet 
 been time to make it so. The things which 
 Chicago has had time to finish often have a 
 style and a distinction which are not to be 
 found in such muddle-headed, floundering 
 places as, for instance. New York. The New- 
 Yorker is indeed the most striking and un- 
 happy contrast possible to the Chicagoan — 
 
84 American Towns and People 
 
 he is fatuously proud of his town and yet will 
 not turn his hand over for it. The true Chi- 
 cagoan will sell his soul for Chicago, and 
 sometimes has to. Upon the shoulders of 
 each typical Chicagoan Chicago lies like a 
 burden. If you are not willing to accept this 
 responsibility you move away from Chicago. 
 And it has been maliciously suggested that the 
 joie de vivre SO conspicuous in the expatriates 
 from that city scattered over the whole world 
 may be slightly analogous to that of the galley- 
 slave released. For the loyalty and service de- 
 manded of residents are deep and searching. 
 The march of improvement must be partici- 
 pated in by one and all, and there is no light- 
 est aspect of life too trivial to have importance. 
 One poor-spirited fellow who has moved to 
 New York explains, almost paradoxically, 
 what for him are the possibilities of pleasure 
 in the Eastern metropolis. 
 
 ''If," he says, "I want to spend a quiet even- 
 ing at home, perhaps with a good book, I know 
 that the tables in the restaurants are all en- 
 gaged, that the theaters will be crowded, the 
 Broadway sidewalks thronged, and that in 
 a thousand supper-places youth and pleasure 
 will chase the glowing hours till dawn. 
 Everything is going at top speed, and in any 
 case no one would think it my fault if it 
 weren't. In New York I can stay at home in 
 
The Windy City on a windy day. 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 85 
 
 peace. In Chicago I should have an uneasy 
 sense that somehow, somewhere, I ought to 
 be actively completing that evening's triumph- 
 ant Chicago picture." 
 
 There is always a hint of treachery in this 
 moving away. A really high-minded Chica- 
 goan transfers his residence only after fasting 
 and prayer and taking counsel of his most 
 earnest friends. Ideally he should be con- 
 vinced, first, that he will return; and, second, 
 that from the more effete Washington, Eu- 
 rope, or New York he can bring back loot to 
 adorn Chicago, as a Roman might have 
 fetched home the spoils of Antioch and Athens 
 to enrich the seven hills. Neither at home nor 
 abroad can the Chicagoan escape the convic- 
 tion of what he is. 
 
 Chicago is, in a sense which should now be 
 comprehensible, the most self-conscious great 
 city of the world. The word is used accu- 
 rately; self-consciousness does not necessarily 
 include either over-sensitiveness or conceit. 
 The great Western town knows, better than 
 any outsiders can, its merits and its faults. 
 
 For a long time Chicago existed in a kind 
 of wilderness. Before the World's Fair of 
 some quarter of a century ago it was a kind 
 of terra incognita. Even now visitors, espe- 
 cially those from abroad, are guilty of an in- 
 credible vagueness about even the town's geog- 
 
86 American Towns and People 
 
 raphy. There is a story about some strangers 
 entertained at a well-known club who asked 
 where the lake was of which they heard peo- 
 ple speak, and when, from the very windows 
 of the room where they sat its blue expanse 
 was pointed out, expressed surprise, since they 
 had supposed that was the Pacific Ocean! It 
 is not long ago that an intelligent Philadelphia 
 lady spoke of a friend who was "going out" 
 to Chicago to live, much as an early-nine- 
 teenth-century Londoner might have spoken 
 of any one who was settling in New Guinea. 
 For a long time the East thought of Chicago 
 with ignorant, wondering amazement, recog- 
 nized it economically, but not socially. 
 
 This was the period of legends which told 
 of the big feet of Chicago girls and of the 
 universality of divorce there. It was the time 
 — not altogether past — of English novels 
 which introduced Silas P. Guigg, a pork- 
 packer, and his vulgar and pushing family. 
 The facts are that the Chicagoans of that day 
 were, many of them, really engaged in build- 
 ing houses designed by Richardson, entertain- 
 ing Matthew Arnold, and collecting libraries 
 of first editions, and that then, as now, few, 
 if any of them, had ever seen the stock-yards. 
 But it availed them nothing in the outer 
 world. , There is an apocryphal story of Eu- 
 gene Field meeting in London a distinguished 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 87 
 
 female novelist who was wide-eyed with won- 
 dering amazement at learning of his usual 
 habitat, and inquired gravely into his origins. 
 
 "Well, madam," he is said to have answered, 
 "when I was caught I was living in a tree!" 
 
 The inhabitants of the regions east of the 
 Alleghanies can scarcely have at any period 
 imagined that Chicagoans were actually 
 swinging by their tails in jungles bordering 
 Lake Michigan, but they did view people 
 from those shores with great distrust. I^adies 
 of that town, escaping to the fuller, richer 
 life of London or New York, sometimes de- 
 nied their origin, and even transformed them- 
 selves into Virginians, always a popular 
 though partly unconvincing method of claim- 
 ing aristocracy of birth in America. 
 
 It would be the grossest exaggeration to de- 
 scribe these early Chicagoans as outcasts in 
 the land, yet there is just enough of truth in 
 the statement to make it understandable how 
 the town was knit together and how civic 
 enthusiasm and pride were the answer to the 
 challenge of an efifete and doubting world. 
 It must always be remembered that even in 
 this Mid-Western country Chicago is new — 
 when it was a mere frontier post both Cincin- 
 nati and St. Louis had old-established fami- 
 lies and hereditary wealth. 
 
 Of course Chicago did not even begin quite 
 
88 American Towns and People 
 
 in the style of the stone age. Many of those 
 early settlers packed in their baggage the best 
 traditions and the finest culture of the East — 
 the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party died 
 in Chicago in '52. But in the building of the 
 new metropolis the more elegant immigrants 
 v^orked shoulder to shoulder with many 
 rougher-hewn pioneers. And there is a queer, 
 almost pathetic, kind of comedy in the memo- 
 ries of the attempts of the one sort gently and 
 fraternally to civilize the other. A book giv- 
 ing the history of the most aristocratic of Chi- 
 cago's clubs records gravely and sweetly how 
 many of the first members had to be taught 
 what a club was and how a gentleman used 
 one. And it is true that the reactions of the 
 raw kind of Chicagoan to the more finished 
 civilizations of the world were often notable. 
 There is a singularly pleasant story of two 
 young gentlemen — of the second generation — 
 who were bicycling in Italy. One day they 
 passed through a fairly large town. They 
 were for the moment engrossed in baseball 
 talk; still at the gate at the farther end of 
 the city one of them paused. 
 
 "Don't you think," he said, "we ought to 
 find out what place this is?" 
 
 They asked and discovered that it was Flor- 
 ence. Contented with the information, they 
 rode on and resumed their talk! 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 89 
 
 So much for the immunity from impression. 
 Of course more sensitive souls there were, too. 
 The famous lady, for example, who, after a 
 single trip abroad, opened the gates of her 
 country place on a Wisconsin lake so that of 
 a Saturday night "the peasants ( !) might come 
 in and from the lawn listen to the music in the 
 drawing-room." 
 
 All this is broad comedy, and nothing to be 
 especially ashamed of. There is sometimes 
 now to be discovered in the new Middle West 
 an almost snobbish tendency to forget the past 
 and to pretend that there never was a time 
 when lettuce salad was dressed with vinegar 
 and sugar. A Middle-Westerner not yet de- 
 crepit seizes this opportunity to confess that 
 he can perfectly remember the year when 
 olive-oil crossed the Alleghanies, and that he 
 believes the earlier sour-sweet dish had a racy 
 flavor of the very ante-bellum Americanism 
 which reclaimed all that northwestern wilder- 
 ness. 
 
 Chicago is, in Bacon's phrase, "young in 
 years, old in hours." It is almost literally a 
 creation of yesterday. A little group of Chi- 
 cagoan residents of New York dining together 
 termed themselves jocosely "survivors of the 
 Fort Dearborn massacre," and really might 
 almost have been. The incredible speed with 
 which things have had to be accomplished 
 
90 American Towns and People 
 
 sometimes makes in only two generations of a 
 Chicago family the traditional complete his- 
 tory from the rude pioneer American ancestor 
 to the over-cultivated Europeanized descend- 
 ant. It is just the violence of such transitions 
 w^hich accounts for much of the town's special 
 flavor, for that note of vigor, of competence, 
 of achievement, which made a Washington- 
 ian once assert that in the wilds of Africa she 
 would be able to tell a Chicago woman by the 
 mere firm hand-clasp. 
 
 The years count for so much by Lake 
 Michigan that the most preposterous effect of 
 age can be produced almost while you wait. 
 The old residential streets from which fashion 
 has ebbed have already a quaintness which 
 will soon be comparable to that of Beacon 
 Hill, and in the regions where the early Chi- 
 cagoans built their summer cottages (before 
 the North Shore of Massachusetts was thought 
 of) there are delicious examples of nineteenth- 
 century domestic architecture which will be 
 invaluable when the history of art in that pe- 
 riod comes to be written. 
 
 As for old families, nowhere in America is 
 laudator temporis acti as loud in regrets as in 
 our youngest great city at the passing of an 
 earlier aristocracy and the social swamping of 
 the town by new people. And though this 
 sounds absurd, it is not in the least absurd; the 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 91 
 
 odd compression of Chicago makes the settlers 
 of the '6o's seem as if they might have come in 
 the '6o's of the eighteenth century. 
 
 The contrasts resulting from the town's 
 fabulously quick growth are often startling 
 and picturesque. The uncertainty of actual 
 personal safety was formerly, for the alien ob- 
 server, one of the most pleasing features of 
 the picture. Only a decade or so ago bandits 
 used to seize especially promising home-goers 
 at six in the evening in the crowded and well- 
 lit North Clark Street and, dragging their vic- 
 tims through the dark and lonely side streets 
 to the Lake Shore Drive, there rob at their 
 leisure. And the mining-camp aspect of the 
 great city was luridly obvious near the sin- 
 ister Rush Street Bridge, where all through 
 the night ladies wearing upon their lovely per- 
 sons the traditional king's ransom in jewels 
 sped in luxurious carriages over a thorough- 
 fare upon which no solitary nocturnal pedes- 
 trian dared venture. But sandbagging and 
 footpads' work have declined with the years, 
 so Chicagoans to-day assure the simple and 
 trusting stranger. 
 
 There is some desolate made land by the 
 lake, for a long time unbuilt upon, the abode 
 of a squatter who claimed title to it and de- 
 fied all the ordinary processes of law and vio- 
 lence to evict him. Near by his hut is the 
 
92 American Towns and People 
 
 "Casino," briefly to be described as a sort of 
 country club in town, which is of an advanced 
 elegance and style and beauty which make 
 it quite the "smartest" thing in America. And 
 it is quite possible that sometimes the air out- 
 side might be pierced by the memories of un- 
 availing cries of the rude and untutored sand- 
 baggers' prey while in the Casino's polished 
 lovely rooms dozens of able-bodied Chicago 
 young men are whipped in by public-spirited 
 women to drink tea in a fashion that makes 
 their town honorably compare with Paris or 
 London in idle, ante-bellum days. 
 
 Tea-drinking is indeed trivial, but nothing 
 is too trivial for attention if it can perfect 
 Chicago. In the old days when Anglomania 
 was fashionable in America a Chicago hos- 
 tess — a Presbyterian, too — was deeply dis- 
 tressed if men did not accept the whisky and 
 soda, and ladies the cigarettes, which ad- 
 vices from London assured her were offered at 
 tea-time in that capital. And a rumor that 
 young noblemen staying in English country 
 houses required a refreshing glass of kilmmel 
 frappe sent to their rooms before breakfast 
 would have been seriously investigated from 
 this lady's establishment in Lake Forest. 
 
 All this is not particularly from any slavish 
 wish to copy the modes of other towns. It 
 is more in the nature of a guarantee of good 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 93 
 
 faith, an evidence that even if it is painful 
 to be fashionable, if it be for the good of Chi- 
 cago devoted creatures stand ready to be fash- 
 ionable. Or fashionable and artistic com- 
 bined! The early days of opera, in every 
 American city which has attempted it, have 
 always been marked by the martyrdom of the 
 American music-hating male. New York 
 went through such a period, emerging at last 
 with an institution incredibly popular but no 
 longer violently fashionable. And Chicago 
 has seen the light. It gave itself lately one 
 winter's respite — a winter marked, so local ob- 
 servers asserted, by unusual social high spirits. 
 But it has again taken up its operatic cross and, 
 to its astonishment, finds it very light. In the 
 fertile Chicago soil musical taste grows 
 quickly. 
 
 The early days of the Chicago Orchestra 
 were marked by the same support given by all 
 the social machinery to a civic and artistic en- 
 terprise. There was even a brave pretense 
 that it was a gay, smart thing to dine Saturday 
 night and to go on to a Brahms symphony. 
 Now the Orchestra is genuinely liked, and 
 larkish society people are free to dine at eight 
 and arrive at a musical comedy at half-past 
 nine if they like, just as they do in New York. 
 
 There is no telling what such a deeply 
 American community as Chicago will accom- 
 
94 American Towns and People 
 
 plish, once it puts its mind to it. Upon the 
 stage the speech of Chicagoans is made to rasp 
 like a buzz-saw. But an Englishman visiting 
 this country some years ago reported on his 
 return that the American accent softest and 
 pleasantest to his ear he had heard in Chicago. 
 If he was right it is because the natural Mid- 
 Western accent would have been the least 
 pleasant and that Chicago had in consequence 
 gone to the greatest pains to correct it. 
 
 Chicago, indeed, gives the lie to almost all 
 the traditions concerning it. It is, for ex- 
 ample — if one could trust people who have 
 never been there — the most material of our 
 towns. But, oddly enough, it is really not with 
 material development that the student of Chi- 
 cago should concern himself, for — paradoxi- 
 cal though it may sound — Chicago competes 
 with Boston for the position of the least ma- 
 terial of our cities. 
 
 First of all, Chicago is not, as things go in 
 America, a rich town. It is not poor, but it 
 lacks the huge money accumulations of New 
 York, and the average prominent citizen is 
 not hopelessly struggling to discover some way 
 of spending his income. The great fortunes 
 of Chicago are, on the whole, of mercantile 
 and manufacturing origin rather than of the 
 haute finance, and the resultant tone is one 
 of sobriety, almost frugality. Chicago wealth 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 95 
 
 is — contrary to all accepted tradition — not os- 
 tentatious. In the earlier, more tumultuous 
 days when the city was the farthest point east 
 touched by a wild and woolly West and 
 Southwest, they set silver dollars in the tessel- 
 lated pavement of the Palmer House barber- 
 shop, and the legend went forth of an unbri- 
 dled vulgarity. Meanwhile in fact the whole 
 structure of public foundations and charities 
 was being built up with amazing swiftness by 
 the prompt generosity and public spirit of 
 two — at the most, three — generations. The 
 open purse for civic needs genuinely acted to 
 maintain a certain modesty in the standards 
 of private living which still persists. Money 
 is not despised there, but if you must be poor, 
 Chicago is not a bad place to try it in. 
 
 It is not a bad place to try to be democratic 
 in. Society there is, of course, elegant and 
 fashionable, and to all intents and purposes 
 exactly like any other American society in its 
 habits and customs. And yet, on the whole, 
 one might venture to say that it leans rather 
 on the side of unpretentiousness and well-bred 
 accessibility. It might be taken in evidence 
 that a daily newspaper recently put up plac- 
 ards in all the street-cars with this urgent ap- 
 peal to even the humble strap-hanger, "Watch 
 for your name in our new department of so- 
 ciety news"! 
 
96 American Towns and People 
 
 Chicago, perhaps just because it knows that 
 the world is likely to accuse it of the contrary, 
 is, if anything, almost unduly anxious to be 
 modest, quiet, and well-bred. In the summer 
 it avoids Newport and places too tainted with 
 the famous vulgarity of New York, and on 
 the shores of New Engand claims a natural 
 affinity with Boston's quieter civilization and 
 frugal culture. Indeed it is no little mock 
 New York, but rather, if one may risk the 
 comparison, a great, unshackled, rough and 
 lively Boston of the West, with all the vitality 
 and the sharp indigenous quality which were 
 once the especial possession of the New Eng- 
 land capital. Strange religions and new phi- 
 losophies now spring from the prairie more 
 lustily than ever from Beacon Hill. Even 
 poesy has gone westward, and all Illinois is 
 now a nest of singing-birds. 
 
 Nowhere can the persistent efficiency of 
 the Western metropolis be more plainly seen 
 and more agreeably studied than in this mat- 
 ter of art. It was somewhere along in the 
 '8o's of the last century that the now classic 
 prophecy was uttered that, ''when she got 
 ready, Chicago would make culture hum." 
 Culture is now being made to hum there as 
 nowhere else in the world. The gathering of 
 students at the Art Institute is something ma- 
 jestic and unparalleled; never in the world 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 97 
 
 have so many eager pilgrims simultaneously 
 approached the shrines of painting and sculp- 
 ture. If numbers are to count, Chicago is 
 already the art center of the world. It is too 
 early to judge by results whether this great 
 Mid-Western country — of which Chicago is 
 consciously and proudly the capital — is as 
 fertile a soil for art as it is for corn. Time 
 will tell; genius shows itself where God wills, 
 whether it be in Iowa or in France. Mean- 
 while an intensive culture of these prairie 
 fields is being practiced. Not only are the 
 students lusty and eager, as befits their origin, 
 but the outside public of mere appreciators 
 strains, as it were, at the leash. It is possible 
 in Chicago, and in Chicago only, for a gay, 
 fashionable party of young people, after 
 lunching at a smart restaurant, to adjourn to 
 the Institute, where the thoughtful host has 
 engaged a lecturer to give them a little talk 
 on the pictures there displayed! 
 
 There is, indeed, in Chicago an efficiency in 
 dealing with art so hard and bright as almost 
 to terrify easier-going people from slacker 
 communities. Art clubs, art associations, art- 
 display rooms, art theaters, art tea-rooms, and 
 so forth are wisely concentrated in certain ad- 
 mirable buildings where all the advantages of 
 elevators, central heating, and general tele- 
 phonic service are to be secured. The Chi- 
 
98 American Towns and People 
 
 cago Little Theater was a peculiarly striking 
 example of the Chicago way of dealing with 
 budding art. In New York such a tentative 
 enterprise would probably be housed in a 
 transformed studio or a disused and forgotten 
 playhouse or a rebuilt old mansion in the 
 slums. In Chicago it existed on the twelfth 
 or twentieth floor of a clean, sanitary, and ex- 
 pensive building, where art seemed to shed any 
 bedraggled bohemian quality it may have in 
 older civilizations. Here in a thoroughly dis- 
 infected air you might, for example, see a play 
 of medieval monkish life written by a young 
 girl from Michigan and played by Wisconsin 
 artists. Again culture must tremble like a 
 hunted fox in the thickets, for quite probably 
 both play and players will be excellent. 
 
 Art is indeed domesticated among Chica- 
 goans — they are scarcely afraid of it at all. It 
 has seemed quite natural that in one of the 
 drinking-rooms of the University Club there 
 should be decorative and satirical frescoes by 
 members of the club, who are valued because 
 they are artists, not merely tolerated as they 
 might be in more effete but supposedly more 
 artistic regions. 
 
 Chicago's attitude to the drama is interest- 
 ing, significant, and full of promise. And 
 here reference is not primarily to the en- 
 dowed or the avowedly "artistic" theater, but 
 
The Portrait of Chicago 99 
 
 to the commercial institution, which of neces- 
 sity is still freighted with the greater cargo 
 of dramatic hopes. Chicago is the only great 
 town outside New York which can reasonably 
 claim independence of the judgments of the 
 Eastern metropolis. Success in New York is 
 no guarantee of success in Chicago, and fail- 
 ure on Broadway may even be a recommenda- 
 tion near Michigan Boulevard. Chicago is 
 our second — with the possible exception of the 
 Pacific coast cities — our only other "produc- 
 ing center"; plays first shown there may win 
 a profitable local patronage and travel to ad- 
 vantage on the Chicago reputation through 
 a wide district of rich tributary province. 
 The advantage to the American theater of 
 having a second string to its bow is incalcula- 
 ble. Indeed, no one can really think it other 
 than advantageous for American civilization 
 that Chicago should think itself and be a real 
 capital, an independent metropolis. 
 
 There are, even from the Chicagoan point 
 of view, blemishes on the reverse of the medal 
 of victory; the gallant struggle for independ- 
 ence and perfection is not yet over. The 
 prizes which the East can offer to talent and 
 ambition are often richer than those within 
 Chicago's power, and there is a constant small 
 drain of its resources in the migration of men 
 and women to the Eastern seaboard. But this 
 
100 American Towns and People 
 
 is in the end more than balanced by the con- 
 stant immigration, from the East and from 
 the prairie country, of the young and ambi- 
 tious. Chicago is for them still a land of op- 
 portunity, democratic enough to have chances 
 still open for all, American enough to have 
 faith that all the chances are winning ones. 
 Even those who desert have gained something 
 from contact with the boundless vigor of the 
 giant city. Every American ought to live — 
 at least for a little while — in Chicago. 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 
 
 ANY one trying to catch and write down 
 the individual quality of towns and 
 cities is forever being delighted and surprised 
 at the way in which the look of buildings, 
 streets, and gardens betrays the character of 
 places and their inhabitants. If some lonely 
 stranger were to visit the capital of these 
 United States and leave it, having talked with 
 no one, he would, for all that, carry away 
 shining memories of almost all that was 
 needed for the understanding of Washington. 
 He would first of all remember that upon a 
 hill at one end of the town the Capitol, the 
 most beautiful building in America, lies like 
 a fair white cloud. At the other end of a 
 great avenue, he would have gone by the 
 President's House sitting upon a green lawn. 
 From a small, smooth knoll among leafy 
 groves near the broad river he would have 
 seen a gleaming white shaft incredibly pierce 
 the blue of a soft. Southern sky. And he 
 would know that the business of governing 
 the country is the only one going on in Wash- 
 
 101 
 
I02 American Towns and People 
 
 ington; and that politics is, always has been, 
 and always will be the town's one great pre- 
 occupation. 
 
 As Petrograd rose as If by magic from the 
 marshes of the Neva, so did Washington, 
 something over a century ago, from the lovely 
 wooded hills along the Potomac. The capital 
 grew more slowly. The stories are well known 
 of Mrs. Adams's domestic difficulties at the 
 White House. Outside the President's Pal- 
 ace, things were worse in a city which a 
 visiting Frenchman wittily described as con- 
 sisting of streets without houses and houses 
 without streets. The early memoirs are 
 largely concerned with carriages, freighted 
 with elegant females, stuck in the main ave- 
 nues in mud which rose to the very hubs of 
 their wheels. Things are better now. Wash- 
 ington has grown to be populous and well 
 equipped. But it is still unspotted by indus- 
 try; it requires the active, blundering efforts 
 of the government Itself — as lately — to build 
 chimneys big enough to stain its clear. South- 
 ern sky. It has no trade and no manufactures. 
 Rome is the only other uncommercial great 
 capital In the world ; and even in Rome there 
 has been for years a persistent, though unau- 
 thenticated, story of the existence there of a 
 corn-starch factory. Washington Is the resi- 
 dence of political America and nothing more. 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 103 
 
 If you withdrew the government of the U. S. 
 A., it would at once vanish into thin air like 
 an enchanted city in an Arabian tale. 
 
 Just as in New York they talk Wall Street, 
 in Philadelphia family, and in Boston books, 
 so in Washington they talk politics. That, 
 outside the national capital, we do not gen- 
 erally discuss our national affairs is one of our 
 American faults. It is the constant reproach 
 of visiting foreigners, who in their own best 
 society always find the men engaged in run- 
 ning the country. It is some such recognition 
 of its own incompleteness which is behind 
 New York's deep conviction that Washington 
 ought to be in New York rather than in the 
 District of Columbia. It is just this social 
 lack at home which drives so many of even the' 
 silliest New-Yorkers to make flying trips to 
 the Potomac. Perhaps they do not quite 
 know it, but they go there to hear political talk 
 and to see the American horizon widen till the 
 Mississippi Valley and the Western moun- 
 tains and the sunset over the Pacific come into 
 view. 
 
 The non-Washingtonian must record his 
 gratitude that Washingtonians talk politics, 
 even if they often talk stupidly and frivo- 
 lously. The great dome of the Capitol is 
 dimly seen in the background of every Wash- 
 ingtonian picture. Gentlemen spitting in the 
 
104 American Towns and People 
 
 lobbies of the cheaper hotels, and lovely ladies 
 serving tea to foreign counts in Louis XVI. 
 drawing-rooms, all talk the gossip of govern- 
 ment. It is not too fantastic even to imagine 
 that some sweet, underclad little debutante 
 might in the intervals of the dance softly mur- 
 mur some secret of the last Cabinet meeting. 
 No one in Washington is so obscure as not to 
 have some ''inside information." No one but 
 has some connection with the government, has 
 had, or hopes to have some such connection. 
 The ebbing political tides leave very agree- 
 able people on the Washingtonian rocks who 
 linger on in idleness. Dolly Madison had a 
 house for years just across the green from the 
 greater residence where she had held her gay 
 court; it is a pleasant example which might 
 well be followed. Widows there are, and re- 
 tired generals and admirals. Old gentlemen, 
 too, who have been in the Senate and the 
 Cabinet — too enfeebled for active political 
 service, but quite strong enough to heave a 
 stone at the White House whenever the fancy 
 takes them. Such people are immensely ser- 
 viceable in such a community. But for them, 
 Washington would be merely a transient hotel, 
 with a great part of the population evicted 
 every four years. New Congressmen and 
 others come to the capital as fresh as paint, and 
 fortunately find there these retired sages who 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 105 
 
 can school them in the ancient Washington 
 tradition. Nothing in America is pleasanter 
 than such an unofficial drawing-room, where, 
 as dusk settles on the town and the palaces of 
 the government, callers drop in with lightly 
 given but authentic information as to how 
 America stands that day in the world. There 
 are agreeably embittered old ladies, too, who 
 have watched statesmen come and go like the 
 grass that is cut down. And belles through 
 many administrations who confront life no 
 more gayly on present-day terrapin and cham- 
 pagne than in old times on chicken-salad and 
 ice-cream and coffee. Pleasant survivals of 
 an earlier time — trained, all of them, to talk 
 politics and to gossip. 
 
 Gossip, indeed — about serious matters and 
 about matters of no importance whatever — 
 forms the background of the Washington pic- 
 ture. The town is already in what may be 
 called its anecdotage. Washington, just by 
 virtue of being uncommercial, is a personal 
 town. Never anywhere in the world were 
 there so many stories about people. They are 
 told to-day in pleasant, leisure hours; they 
 have been set down in many volumes of mem- 
 oirs and in the innumerable records of the 
 hordes of newspaper correspondents who have 
 from the beginning fattened upon the capital. 
 The stories are not always very important, not 
 
I06 American Towns and People 
 
 always particularly significant. Still it is 
 agreeable, for example, to know that a female 
 journalist of an early day secured an interview 
 with President John Quincy Adams while that 
 august personage was bathing in the Potomac, 
 as was his custom, from the foot of the White 
 House grounds, by the usual expedient of re- 
 moving his clothes, and thus keeping him in 
 the water till he had answered her questions. 
 It is also a pleasant minor fact that our once so 
 popular song, "Listen to the Mocking-Bird," 
 was first heard at a White House concert given 
 in honor of the Prince of Wales. And it is 
 piquant to learn of an early foreign ambassa- 
 dor who was accustomed to beat his wife to 
 the accompaniment of a 'cello played by his 
 first secretary for the purpose of drowning her 
 screams. Washington has a mellow past. 
 
 Before tackling the majestic spectacle of the 
 town's present, a word may be spared for the 
 future. Not, perhaps, so much for the future 
 as for the people of all kinds who come there 
 with an eye upon that period — whose connec- 
 tion with the government is that of hope de- 
 ferred. Office-seeking has, through civil-ser- 
 vice reform, lost something of its picturesque 
 resemblance to the locusts invading Egypt. 
 But the axes to grind which are unpacked in 
 hotel bedrooms are still numerous. There are 
 the usual conventional lobbyists seeking to 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 107 
 
 dredge Mud Creek or to build a hundred- 
 thousand-dollar post-office for Bird Center. 
 You can tell them in the hotel offices by a cer- 
 tain lean and hungry eagerness, and by a sort 
 of Washington costume which they wear — it is 
 not the statesman's traditional black broad- 
 cloth, and yet it somehow manages to look as 
 if it were. Then there are, besides, odd 
 claimants and queer pretenders. There are 
 tired old ladies in rusty black bonnets who, 
 perhaps, hope still to be rich from the French 
 Spoliation Claims, or look forward to induc- 
 ing Congress to pension the third cousins of 
 descendants of those who fought in the Mexi- 
 can War. Inventors, too, are to be found, 
 some on the very highroad to prosperity via 
 the Patent Office, others destined to linger on 
 for dreary years, pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp 
 of some fantastic good fortune. In one little 
 boarding-house in a seedy side-street half-way 
 toward the Capitol there lately lived no less 
 than three inventors of perpetual motion! — a 
 situation reminiscent of a London legend of 
 the jubilee of Queen Victoria, when, in a 
 squalid Bloomsbury lodging-house, four em- 
 presses, if they had their rights, once took tea 
 together. "Cranks," as we call them, wander 
 vaguely to and fro in all the shadows of the 
 Washingtonian picture, like harmless, amiable 
 ghosts, for the most part — half comic, half 
 
io8 American Towns and People 
 
 tragic. Sometimes, however, the "crank's" 
 eye is lit with some smoldering hate — already 
 in the Washingtonian annals his murderous 
 bullet has put the nation in mourning — the 
 clouds along the murky horizon are lit oc- 
 casionally with lightning. This queer, ob- 
 scure world, this mere penumbra of the gov- 
 ernment, is always present to the imaginative 
 observer. But it must no longer delay con- 
 templation of the great, clearly lime-lit, 
 official world of those who are the vessels of 
 to-day's governmental power and glory. This 
 is a Washington composed and recomposed al- 
 most every four years at the will of the people. 
 These are the Washingtonians who have been 
 defined by one old gentleman as merely the 
 Americans who are not wanted at home. But 
 such tart comments are negligible. This is 
 the real Washington. 
 
 The White House is far and away the most 
 desirable residence to let at the national cap- 
 ital. (This in spite of the nobility of Vice- 
 Presidents, which of course obliges them to 
 the generous tradition of Fillmore, who said, 
 when he was called to the Executive Man- 
 sion, "This is my first misfortune.") It is the 
 most personal, most picturesque of the gov- 
 ernment's possessions. Its history is the his- 
 tory of many of our American ideals. 
 
 In the early days of the Virginian dynasty 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 109 
 
 of Presidents there were "levees" and "draw- 
 ing-rooms" at the White House, and it shel- 
 tered something very like a court. The court 
 ideal dies hard. Even now the red-velvet 
 rope, which in more effete civilization sep- 
 arates the social sheep from the goats, is occa- 
 sionally almost put into use when new admin- 
 istrations try to have receptions where the 
 privileged few are allowed a brief encounter 
 with the royal presence in the Blue Room, 
 serving temporarily as a holy of holies. The 
 White House, as is natural, is the constant 
 theater of the conflict to be observed every- 
 where in American life between our wish to 
 have an aristocracy and our wish not to. But, 
 on the whole, the disinterested observer must 
 adjudge victory to our deep-seated democracy 
 which makes it really unsuitable that the 
 White House should ever be exactly fash- 
 ionable. 
 
 We never forget not only that the Presi- 
 dential residence is our house, but that the 
 President in it is our man. The almost Uto- 
 pian democracy of public receptions at the 
 White House is both engaging and pictur- 
 esque. In the early days Congressmen used 
 to come to them with bowie-knives in their 
 high, cowhide boots; and in Jackson's time 
 guards with stout sticks beat back the guests 
 while the food was being fetched from the 
 
1 10 American Towns and People 
 
 kitchens. Then an evening party had all the 
 charm of a riot. A diplomat complained not 
 so long ago that even at the exclusive recep- 
 tions for the Corps the American young ladies 
 surreptitiously cut all the buttons off his 
 clothes for souvenirs. 
 
 Another diplomat, new to these democratic 
 shores, arriving late for a New- Year's day 
 reception, was astonished to find that the Ne- 
 gro hackman who had driven him to the 
 White House had slipped in ahead of him 
 and was the first to grasp the Presidential 
 hand! He could not understand that the 
 Executive hand is as much the people's prop- 
 erty as the mansion. Mr. Washington did 
 not shake hands, but since then every Presi- 
 dential paw has been squeezed by the pop- 
 ulace almost beyond the power of flaxseed 
 poultices or massage to bring it back to any- 
 thing like original shape. The shake is ex- 
 pected to be wholesome and hearty — even a 
 Boston gentleman complained, under Tyler's 
 administration, that he had caught cold from 
 shaking the President's hand. 
 
 Even while we pay respect to Presidents, 
 we like them to feel that they are like our- 
 selves. An ex-President's wife tells a story 
 of her daughter ordering shoes in Philadel- 
 phia and asking that they should be sent and 
 charged to Mrs. William Howard Taft, The 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan ill 
 
 White House, Washington. The name and 
 address were delivered with a simple, nat- 
 ural, and unpretentious pride. But the 
 shop young lady merely inquired, brightly, 
 ''D. C?" 
 
 The White House soon ceased to be a pal- 
 ace and became more and more an "ideal 
 American home." Its corridors are haunted 
 by the domestic virtues. It supplies the fem- 
 inine element so necessary in governments — 
 and some say in religions. Let a marriage or 
 a birth take place in the White House, and 
 countless thousands over the land dissolve in a 
 sentimental ecstasy of domestic emotion. It 
 is, indeed, difficult for an inmate of the man- 
 sion to remain single or to practice race sui- 
 cide there — vox populi seems to forbid. 
 
 The White House is, in fact, a sort of na- 
 tional shrine. The life of its inhabitants is 
 closely watched by the lynx-eyed all over the 
 country, ready and willing to detect any vari- 
 ation from the national moral standard. 
 There is no detail of White House life or ad- 
 ministration too small to be lit by the lime- 
 light. As early as John Quincy Adams there 
 was bitter criticism of the immorality of put- 
 ting a billiard-table into the White House. 
 Even the question of Presidential "cuspi- 
 dors" — But no apology need be offered for 
 grappling with a subject which in any 
 
112 American Towns and People 
 
 thoughtful survey of American life and social 
 conditions deserves an attention not hitherto 
 given it by serious writers. Treated at length, 
 the utensil might gain an almost epic quality; 
 for the day was when a good aim at it gave 
 you a position in the community in which you 
 lived. Here it can only be used to illustrate 
 how the White House conservatively and dis- 
 creetly marks the rising tide of national re- 
 finement. President Van Buren was accused 
 of extravagance and luxury in having 
 equipped the official residence too freely and 
 elegantly. Impassioned patriots from the 
 West roused anti-administration enthusiasm 
 by descriptions of a simple wooden box of 
 sawdust. And yet only a comparatively few 
 decades later, under President Arthur, the 
 White House cuspidors were — possibly pre- 
 maturely — sold at public auction! 
 
 To speak seriously, year by year the Presi- 
 dent's house pretty fairly represents our na- 
 tional ideals. And there are simple anecdotes 
 in its history, like the one of a President's turn- 
 ing handsprings for his little sons only three 
 hours before he was assassinated, which must 
 move any American deeply with a sense of his 
 genuine indigenous democracy. American- 
 ism, as a word, sometimes seems to be a little 
 flyblown these days. But its reality is proven 
 by the very way in which, estimating Wash- 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 113 
 
 ington, we know we must inevitably give the 
 precedence to the official world. 
 
 There is a heroic, almost grandiose, quality 
 in Washington official society. And here the 
 bare facts and figures about "calling" speak 
 more eloquently than can any commentator 
 upon them. In hurried centers of civilization, 
 such as New York, "the call" is remembered 
 merely as something mother used to make. 
 In Washington it survives not quaintly, but 
 in full vigor. 
 
 A woman whose husband is fairly high up 
 in governmental circles makes, if she does her 
 duty, between fifteen and eighteen hundred 
 calls a winter! These calls have to be made 
 on the official day of each hostess — the Sen- 
 ate ladies, for example, receive only on Thurs- 
 days — an arrangement which ingeniously and 
 cruelly distributes the calling over the whole 
 season. 
 
 There is an elaborate ritual of calls, depend- 
 ent upon official rank. Of course we are too 
 young a country to have anything as marvel- 
 ous as the table in the British Peerage by 
 which you may learn that the Hon. Muriel 
 Snaggs is accurately the eighteen-hundred- 
 and-thirty-ninth most important person in the 
 United Kingdom. But precedence flourishes 
 in Washington. The Cabinet calls first on 
 the Senate, but the House calls first on the 
 
114 American Towns and People 
 
 Cabinet. The hardest Initiation, of course, is 
 of those who must call first on the four hun- 
 dred and thirty-five representatives. Calls 
 must be returned on the first official day, if 
 there is no official day within three days. 
 There is more, but this much must serve to 
 suggest the horrors of a monstrous system. 
 
 There have been, of course, individual re- 
 volts and concerted attempts at simplification. 
 A "Congressional Club" was lately formed to 
 herd women together that they might be 
 called upon en masse. To give one instance, 
 over fifty Congressional ladies living in the 
 same hotel banded together to receive. On ar- 
 rival you were confronted by baskets to re- 
 ceive cards — over fifty, all sweetly ornamented 
 with bows of pink ribbon. Is the scene not 
 one Watteau would have loved to paint? Be- 
 yond the pretty baskets were the Congressional 
 ladies' hands, over fifty, to be shaken; over 
 fifty lovely birds to be killed, as it were, with 
 one stone. But, unhappily, it was soon ru- 
 mored that the banded ladies did not consider 
 this a call, but only an agreeable opportunity 
 to make acquaintance before the formal indi- 
 vidual visits. The car of Juggernaut was 
 weighted a little more heavily, that was all. 
 
 A victim must be quoted : she makes eight- 
 een hundred calls a year, not counting pri- 
 vate or unofficial calls — pleasure calls, if you 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 115 
 
 care so to describe them. She says, simply and 
 touchingly, "I find I must give up a great deal 
 in order to accomplish all this and not kill 
 myself." But she goes on in a strain of im- 
 passioned and martyred optimism which, 
 somehow, makes one understand that the sys- 
 tem cannot be changed: "In one way it is a 
 blessing. Wives from different parts of the 
 country meet; there is an exchange of ideas 
 and views, and a better understanding between 
 the sections. Washington is different from 
 any other place, and it is a pity not to enjoy it 
 to the full as it is." 
 
 Even outside official circles, calling pre- 
 vails. When Miss Harriet Martineau, years 
 ago, arrived in Washington, four hundred 
 strangers called on her during the first twenty- 
 four hours. Women who have moved to 
 Washington ostensibly for their own pleasure 
 have been known to spend an hour every day 
 of their lives calling. It becomes not only a 
 habit, but a passion — a passion exemplified in 
 the Washington lady who was described by 
 her "friend" as "such a sweet, good-natured 
 woman ; she returns your call even when you 
 haven't made one!" 
 
 Almost the highest comedy of democracy 
 is said to be the first reception-days of green 
 Congressional wives, an experience to which 
 these gallant women advance each year in 
 
Il6 American Towns and People 
 
 solid formation. One is almost glad to hear 
 of a deserter. There was a wayward, rebel- 
 lious, and charming Congressional creature re- 
 cently who, as the fateful hour approached 
 when she was to be "at home," suddenly put 
 on her hat and bolted, panic-stricken, round 
 the block. But when, forcing herself to pass 
 her house again, she saw a group of ladies 
 ringing her door-bell, she impulsively joined 
 them and went in. Was she not, like them, 
 a Congressman's wife with a right to call any- 
 where, even upon herself? They sat down 
 and, while waiting for the hostess, chatted 
 agreeably. And when, at the end of it, the 
 callers began to comment wonderingly upon 
 the continued absence of the lady of the house, 
 our heroine smiled enigmatically: "I don't 
 believe," she said, "we had any of us better 
 wait any longer for her. I hear — " she 
 paused and she spoke with meaning — "I hear 
 she's very odd!" She rose, and the other 
 ladies with her. She went on with them to 
 call on another Congressman's wife. 
 
 Congressmen themselves do not call a great 
 deal, it goes without saying. Their leisure is 
 traditionally spent with their feet either high 
 above their heads upon the mantelpiece of 
 under the poker-table — though at the national 
 game the Senate is supposed to surpass the 
 House. Indeed, even more than the compan- 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 117 
 
 ionship of champagne-haired female secre- 
 taries and lobbyists, are cards supposed to fill 
 the rakish idle hours of Senators. Foreign- 
 ers, hearing statesmen whisper chucklingly to 
 one another of "full houses," are said to have 
 rushed vainly to Capitol Hill, expecting great 
 events in the halls of legislation. Congress- 
 men have, of course, been changing with the 
 years. They motor now and play golf at 
 Chevy Chase, and some of them "clean up 
 and go out to dinner" when night falls. In- 
 deed, the government itself encourages their 
 softer side. It was for a long time possible 
 for Congressmen to have bouquets sent free to 
 ladies from the government greenhouses — cu- 
 pid's "graft." Even the most reluctant Ameri- 
 can male cannot wholly withstand the influ- 
 ence of a town which is essentially human and 
 intimate, in the sense that its inhabitants are 
 extraordinarily dependent upon one another 
 for all their amusement. Indeed, what else 
 have they upon which they could depend? 
 
 Upon this point the diplomatic colony, ac- 
 customed to the agrements of the capitals of 
 the world, might be consulted, if they only 
 dared to speak frankly. Washingtonians they 
 have always found hospitable and agreeable, 
 but Washington, as a town, a desert. There 
 are few restaurants. There is no opera and 
 little music. There are theaters, and there 
 
ii8 American Towns and People 
 
 was once a happy period for their managers 
 when rival political parties demonstrated their 
 social strength by going to the play in large 
 and brilliant bands. 
 
 Everybody in Washington can be at an 
 evening party, for everybody is in society of 
 some sort. There are no lower classes, man- 
 ual labor being performed almost exclusively 
 by blacks, who, without unfriendliness, may 
 be described as socially non-existent. Every- 
 body has some one to call upon and to be en- 
 tertained by. So aggravated does Washing- 
 ton's social activity sometimes seem that it has 
 been described as "a town where the streets 
 are always empty and the houses always 
 crowded." 
 
 Early in Washingtonian history the packed 
 sardine became the social ideal. A success- 
 ful evening at the White House in Mrs. Madi- 
 son's time was colloquially termed a "squeeze," 
 while its melancholy opposite was described 
 as a "thin" drawing-room. A philosophic 
 female critic of those days put forth the the- 
 ory that Washington women had a position 
 far in advance of any others in the country 
 because their parties were so crowded that 
 ladies could not sit and wait decorously for 
 gentlemen to approach them, but instead stood, 
 walked about, and even sometimes ventured 
 to speak first themselves ! The habit of crowd- 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 119 
 
 Ing extends beyond the White House. Once 
 at one of the Oriental embassies some four 
 or five hundred quite uninvited guests forced 
 their way in and left only when the sly East- 
 erners actually put burning pepper in a jar 
 to drive them out! 
 
 There is a story always prevalent at the 
 capital of a strange race of indigenous in- 
 habitants who antedate its establishment. 
 These are supposed to be the descendants of 
 the aristocratic first families of Georgetown 
 — that now faded, lovely little city near which 
 the founders of Washington built. To them, 
 it is alleged, the governmental town still 
 seems modern and vulgar, and its inhabitants 
 simply people one does not know. In their 
 shabby but exquisite Georgian drawing-rooms 
 they lurk, sipping China tea out of thin, an- 
 cestral cups. No one knows them, visits them, 
 or, indeed, has ever seen them. This is, of 
 course, what makes possible the pretty legend. 
 Every one should try to believe it; it lends a 
 soft, fragrant, Southern bloom to the shadows 
 of the somewhat over-colored picture of na- 
 tional society gathered from every corner of 
 the country. 
 
 Outside "official" society there has been 
 from the beginning a smaller and more fash- 
 ionable circle at the capital, to which many 
 of the chosen of the people from the remoter 
 
I20 American Towns and People 
 
 districts have seemed a little uncouth. (A 
 Philadelphian Washingtonian of the early 
 days was amused by two Senators who had 
 never seen a "forte-piano," as she termed that 
 musical instrument.) 
 
 Politics — and Senators — are sometimes the 
 fashion with this set, sometimes not. Just now 
 they are pretty much in vogue, having come 
 in with intelligence and "uplift," and broader 
 interests and other fashionable fads. But the 
 day, not so far back, can be remembered in 
 Washington when in the beau monde ladies 
 said, "We had the Senator to dine last night," 
 it was quite clear who was meant, as there 
 was only one Senator who could be trusted 
 to eat in the open. And, so little as ten years 
 ago, gay parties were made up to visit the 
 Capitol, rather as one went to the Zoo, to see 
 a representative who was said never to have 
 washed. Even now you can hear in Wash- 
 ington that an administration is or is not fash- 
 ionable, and learn of periods when it is not 
 at all "the thing" to go to the White House. 
 All this is pleasant and piquant, though we, 
 the plain people, know in our hearts that the 
 third cousin of a Congressman's wife in white 
 wool and rubbers, making her way' on the 
 street-car to "pour" at an afternoon tea is 
 more the real thing than the most fashionable 
 unofficial lady, in whatever corresponds in 
 
The austere towers of the Smithsonian Institute. 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 121 
 
 modern life to the traditional point-lace and 
 diamonds, going out in the most inclosed lim- 
 ousine to dine at an embassy. The more ele- 
 gant of the two females is, after all, only a 
 camp-follower, an exquisite vivandiere in at- 
 tendance upon the great political army. 
 
 So many settlers have frankly migrated to 
 the capital for its softer climate and its greater 
 social advantages that Washington has be- 
 come a national clearing-house for agreeable 
 people from all regions of the country. The 
 capital is, in our land, about the only place 
 except the grave to which people may "retire" 
 with any- hope of peace. Indeed, its air of 
 leisure and its freedom from commerce make 
 it in certain aspects almost like a watering- 
 place, a health resort. 
 
 Every one is welcome in Washington — 
 though this is no complete catalogue. The 
 capital is, to take one example, "peculiarly 
 indicated," as they say abroad in pamphlets 
 about watering-places, for rich widows, who, 
 in a mild Interest in politics and in the sooth- 
 ing conversation of the younger diplomats, 
 find some assuagement. They build their 
 lovely palaces and spin their frail webs in all 
 the principal cross-roads. And every year 
 ladies w^ho are, like Melisande, not quite 
 happy at home move to Washington. There 
 are Bostonians who cannot bear Boston, and 
 
122 American Towns and People 
 
 Chicagoans who cannot stand Chicago. Also 
 many who cannot quite decide to live abroad, 
 and so compromise on the capital. Washing- 
 ton is, in fact, almost the great American so- 
 cial adventure, the melting-pot of Americans 
 themselves. 
 
 Washington used to be a city of boarding- 
 houses — at one of them in the '40's a distin- 
 guished foreign visitor quite by chance had 
 Mr. Henry Clay next her at the breakfast- 
 table — and even now it is permissible for a 
 Vice-President to inhabit a hotel. But the 
 glory of the boarding-house is waning. Now- 
 adays there are plenty of palaces, much ele- 
 gance, and excellent champagne. There are 
 moments when Washington, even official 
 Washington, seems merely gay and fashion- 
 able. But through it all there is the homely 
 homespun quality which we can still claim as 
 American. There was a stor}'', not long ago, 
 of a Secretary of State who met a newly ar- 
 rived ambassador of a great European Power 
 for the first time at an evening party. 
 
 "The boys up at the Department were tell- 
 ing me this morning," began Mr. Secretary, 
 genially, "that there were some difficulties be- 
 tween your country and mine." 
 
 "Yes, yes," murmured the astonished for- 
 eigner, who had been sent especially to discuss 
 this serious matter of a lapsed treaty. 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 123 
 
 "Oh, that's all right," pursued the Secre- 
 tary. "I told the boys I didn't know much 
 about it, but I was sure the trouble wasn't as 
 serious as they thought. We'll fix it." And 
 here he turned to where the ambassador's 
 proud and distinguished wife stood, talking 
 to Mrs. Secretary. "If your husband and I 
 can't get this straightened out," said he, beam- 
 ingly, "then you and mamma must put your 
 heads together and do it for us — that's all!" 
 
 In a town where primitive democratic sim- 
 plicity stands thus unabashed before efifete 
 Europe, it is obvious that much social gayety 
 is essentially tentative and educational. Wash- 
 ington is our great national school of "dining- 
 out." 
 
 With all the development of American 
 civilization, "dining-out" has still — let us be 
 honest — for the greater part of the native-born 
 a character at once semi-sacred and terrifying. 
 The magazine advertisements give glimpses 
 of our easier, more genuinely characteristic 
 circles, where the arrival of guests is signal- 
 ized by the decanning of some beans and the 
 opening of a bottle of Ohio champagne. And 
 ladies may arrive in Washington with the 
 conception, so prevalent in the most popular 
 books and plays, that a butterfly of fashion is 
 mainly occupied with bridge parties and aft- 
 ernoon teas. But at the capital they soon 
 
124 American Towns and People 
 
 wake to the fact that even a "ladies' lunch," 
 however prettily the table and the salad may 
 be decorated, gets them nowhere; and that 
 only formal, concerted, night feeding is so- 
 cially valuable. 
 
 In Washington, however, as everywhere in 
 America, man lags behind in all social ac- 
 tivities. The burden of eating and overeat- 
 ing always falls heavily on a comparatively 
 small band of dining males. You take in the 
 same lady pretty often. Apropos of this, there 
 is a story of a weary young Washingtonian 
 who proposed marriage in this impassioned 
 phrase, "You see, dear, if we are married 
 they'll have to stop putting us next each other 
 at dinner." 
 
 It is needless to insist upon the value, in such 
 a society, of aliens, who eat out easily. In- 
 deed, it can scarcely be wondered at if second, 
 third, and fourth secretaries of the embassies 
 come to believe that the services expected of 
 them are wholly gastronomic. There was a 
 preposterous story at the time when Washing- 
 ton's chief club burned that, in its very smok- 
 ing ruins, young diplomats were seen by the 
 firemen hurriedly counting their boiled shirts 
 to make sure that they could still dine out 
 every night that week! 
 
 A young American girl may learn to reject 
 foreigners almost as well in Washington as 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 125 
 
 abroad — or to marry them. Since the begin- 
 ning, the ladies of the capital have made dis- 
 tinguished, picturesque, romantic alliances 
 with Europe, from the Georgetown girl who 
 married the Russian ambassador and became 
 the famous Madame Bodesco, to Jackson's 
 Peggy Eaton, who in her old age married an 
 Italian dancing-master who rewarded her by 
 eloping with her fortune and her favorite 
 grandchild! 
 
 American men are not linguists, and an am- 
 bassador was once introduced to a gentleman 
 who immediately described himself, '^Moi, je 
 suis le senateur qui parle frangais/^ Yet, 
 somehow, even without the languages, agree- 
 able relations go on, and pleasant friendships 
 are made. Washington, perhaps more than 
 travels, teaches us how like ourselves foreign- 
 ers really are. And they have made notable 
 contributions to our American civilization. 
 Ice-cream — pie's only rival in our national 
 afifections — was actually introduced as a nov- 
 elty at a party at the French ambassador's, 
 and it Is significant that, as a chronicler of 
 the time reports, "the guests were so impatient 
 for it that there was great disorder." 
 
 The war, with its resultant solemn and at 
 first tragic inhibitions, somewhat withdrew 
 foreigners from the Washingtonian picture. 
 But they soon again diversified and enlivened 
 
126 American Towns and People 
 
 it as they have from its earliest days. It is 
 but simple justice to say that they contribute 
 enormously to the capital's famous "pleasant- 
 ness," to its half-gay, half-cultured air of ease. 
 Art has no special place in Washington, cer- 
 tainly no Bohemian haunts; but it has, as it 
 were, an excellent social position. Foreigners, 
 who have all been on easy terms with it in 
 the capitals of Europe, find it neither unnat- 
 ural nor unmanly to speak of it here without 
 shame. It is not obligatory in Washington to 
 have cultivated tastes, but on the whole they 
 are not thought badly of. Indeed, many ad- 
 vantages of life abroad are to be had by the 
 Potomac, including leisure. Washington is 
 not merely a city of magnificent distances — 
 to quote the phrase for which it is indebted to 
 a Portuguese diplomat of its earliest days — 
 it is also a town of spacious leisure for amuse- 
 ment. Perhaps the most powerful impression 
 it makes upon the stranger is of its broad, sun- 
 lit idleness. The great, sleepy avenues are 
 typical of the town's immunity from toil. 
 Government, the only business there, cannot be 
 carried on without some slight effort, but the 
 servants of a democracy are rarely over- 
 worked. The eight-hour day has long been 
 an intolerable burden to Washingtonians. 
 Clerks leave the departments for the day at 
 an hour when hard-working New York brok- 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 127 
 
 ers are just recovering from the luncheon 
 champagne and preparing to tackle the after- 
 noon's business. Washingtonians, indeed, al- 
 ways seem to have time for all the things for 
 which the inhabitants of our huge, lively com- 
 mercial centers have no time — for morning 
 walks, for pleasant afternoon talks, and for 
 knowing everything about one another's af- 
 fairs. It is, as some foreigner aptly put it, the 
 salon of America. 
 
 Though Washingtonians pass, Washington 
 itself lives. The city has an individuality, a 
 tone which cannot but affect its inhabitants. 
 Its amazing, though only half-appreciated, 
 architectural beauty must, even though they 
 are unconscious of it, transmute somewhat the 
 arid New-Englander and the uncouth West- 
 erner. A bland climate where the crocus 
 often pushes through the grass in late January 
 must help teach people how to be idle and 
 amiably gossipy. The town is pleasant — that 
 is almost its most obvious characteristic — and 
 pleasant in a warm, well-fed. Southern way 
 which is irresistible. The Washingtonian airs 
 are almost as redolent of good cooking as the 
 Philadelphian. The capital lies in the great 
 food-belt of the Chesapeake Bay and the Vir- 
 ginian tidewater country. Washington always 
 seems near the source of supplies. You used 
 occasionally to see in the main shopping 
 
128 American Towns and People 
 
 streets countrymen with three or four ducks 
 to sell. And even now the game laws are mys- 
 teriously relaxed for the benefit of the capital 
 — many a New-Yorker takes the trip to Wash- 
 ington just to eat quail. The markets are 
 sprawled over broad streets in a generous con- 
 fusion. Here and there toiling blacks and 
 turbaned negresses make you realize that this 
 is Southern plenty. In spite of all the im- 
 provements to the hotels, the best and most 
 characteristic eating-place is the famous oys- 
 ter-house of nineteenth-century furniture and 
 odors, where the bivalve, roasted, is served 
 with a sauce such as never was by sea or land 
 by grinning, cheerful black waiters, and an 
 even blacker cook whom you instinctively ad- 
 dress as "Snowball." 
 
 The traditional Washingtonian cook Is a 
 happy person of color, preparing his admir- 
 able dishes with gusto and abandon. He 
 grows rarer, of course, as the old South passes. 
 But to encounter such a one is good fortune, 
 even if it be for nothing more than a half- 
 hour's gastronomic gossip. The occasion is 
 here seized to record such a brief meeting with 
 a distinguished old gentleman of color, de- 
 scribed by a competent authority as the best 
 cook in America. As a boy, so he explained, 
 he had been apprenticed in Philadelphia to a 
 famous cook who was then an old man. His 
 
/-lHn|%^^ 
 
Washington, the Cosmopolitan 129 
 
 cooking recipes thus go back to Revolution- 
 ary days, with only one transference from 
 hand to hand. It is impossible not to feel 
 that these formulas, never committed to writ- 
 ing or to print, are the sacred secrets of an 
 ancient and honorable profession. It is ab- 
 surd, perhaps, but a vivid, pleasant sense of 
 the country's long history is warmed into pa- 
 triotic being as one thinks that Mr. Washing- 
 ton may have eaten with relish of, shall we say, 
 ''snapping- turtle soup"? This, says the old 
 man who now alone can prepare it, "we used 
 to make when the season for terrapin was 
 over"; and he adds, in a decorous, courtly. 
 Southern way, "It was considered one of the 
 best of our riverside dishes." Does not the 
 last phrase suggest delightfully the great Po- 
 tomac, and the pleasant country, and, more, 
 that the capital has by the famous river's 
 course eaten this many a year good food and 
 drunk good wine and talked good talk? 
 
 Washington, when the day's work of gov- 
 erning the land is over, is a great, warm, sun- 
 lit, spacious, idle drawing-room where one can 
 savor to the full the flavor of our own Ameri- 
 can land. Even the dullest imagination must, 
 on Capitol Hill, stir to some sense of the pag- 
 eant of our history, to some memories of all the 
 great Americans who have through the years 
 streamed here to the country's heart. The 
 
130 American Towns and People 
 
 town's name must, even while we are gay and 
 idle and gossipy, mean something, commemo- 
 rate somehow the Father of his Country. He 
 who rode horseback over the lovely, wooded 
 Maryland hills to choose its site does indeed 
 still haunt them; now they are crowned with 
 marble. He lives. And Lincoln, perhaps. 
 And many others if we have heart and eyes to 
 see them. They, too, make the town pleasant. 
 
Baltimore 
 
 FOR the sentimental traveler in our coun- 
 try one of the pleasantest adventures will 
 always be his start down the Atlantic seaboard 
 and his eager watch for the first signs that he 
 has come into the romantic South. There has 
 been an amazing change of feeling in these 
 peaceful post-bellum days; it is scarcely fan- 
 tastic or paradoxical to say that it is the North- 
 erner now who is tenderest of the memories of 
 that earlier, lovelier South. Yet the North- 
 erner, on his romantic journey, is only too apt 
 to think that until he has at least crossed the 
 Potomac he is still in his own country. In- 
 deed, it is often only orange trees and palms 
 which will finally convince him. But latitude 
 and climate are not everything; North is 
 North and South is South in spite of them. 
 Even if the snow flies as his train pulls into 
 Baltimore, he should descend from it, for he 
 is passing the South's metropolis, her strong- 
 est, richest city — near the Northern frontier, 
 it is true, but proudly asserting her right to 
 act and to speak for the South, even though 
 in those old war days she was racked and 
 
 131 
 
132 American Towns and People 
 
 torn by two loyalties, burnt and martyred by 
 the flames of tsvo patriotisms. 
 
 Baltimore's present ''Southernness" is not 
 perhaps the kind of thing wholly demonstra- 
 ble. True, you will at once hear the unmis- 
 takable accent upon everybody's lips. And 
 you will find the black race on every hand, 
 often in picturesque destitution and the classic 
 dishevelment and bandanna head-dress, but 
 oftener in amazing prosperity and, especially 
 in Druid Hill Park of a Sunday, in dazzling 
 and immaculate raiment. But the Southern 
 quality, which for the sentimental traveler 
 hangs over everything like a veil, is more 
 elusive. There are streets of red brick houses 
 which, but for the grace of God, might be on 
 Beacon Hill in Boston. There are white 
 marble steps no more shining than those in 
 the Quaker neighbor, Philadelphia. There is 
 no hint of decay or neglect to suggest the near- 
 ness of the easy-going subtropics. Yet some- 
 how it is possible to detect a softer grace, a 
 Southern richness of bloom. These are the 
 people who so naturally speak of their door- 
 steps as "pleasure porches," and call a strip of 
 beach along the Chesapeake a "pleasure 
 shore." In fact, there is always a hint of leis- 
 ure about Baltimorean activity — the "rush 
 hour" comes early. And there seems all 
 through the day more time than in most places 
 
Baltimore 133 
 
 for the smaller courtesies; probably nowhere 
 are so many women overburdened with heavy 
 market-baskets helped to mount the car steps. 
 Those market-baskets, too, hint at good living, 
 "Southern style." But Baltimore's title of 
 "gastronomic capital of America" must be 
 treated later, more at length, and in a style 
 more impassioned and lyric. It must be 
 enough now to say that there is all through 
 the town a sense of that richer cuisine, that 
 more frank enjoyment of the pleasures of the 
 table, which here with us, just as in France, 
 to cite a suitable gastronomic example, tells 
 you that you are headed Southward. 
 
 Baltimore's streets are little vexed by tour- 
 ists, for the most part undisturbed by the 
 rumble and the megaphones of "sightseeing 
 wagons." Lounging along them, it is possible 
 to have something of that pride of discoverer 
 and explorer which to any true lover of towns 
 and sights gives such a warming proprietary 
 feeling. Baltimore is so near at hand that it 
 seems obvious — and is neglected. It has, it 
 must be admitted, few definite "sights," ex- 
 cept an admirable gallery of paintings^ which 
 is unaccountably kept closed for almost half 
 the year. There is, if you like, little to see — 
 just the town itself. But the town itself is 
 so very pleasant! 
 
 At the very beginning it is almost inevitable 
 
134 American Towns and People 
 
 that one should speak of the monument to 
 Washington. It is around it, sitting upon its 
 green hill, that the town groups itself, and to 
 it, in a way, that one's memories of Baltimore 
 cling. The monument still manages, in spite 
 of the passing of almost a century and the 
 coming of steel construction and skyscrapers, 
 to dominate the Baltimorean scene. It will 
 probably be the center of the view from your 
 hotel window. You will see it in its small 
 park, surrounded by respectable pleasant 
 streets of spacious old brick houses, and be- 
 yond it the gilded domes of the old Roman 
 Catholic cathedral, giving a curious exotic 
 touch to the picture, while they also remind 
 you of the Calverts and the early days of the 
 Catholic colony. You may perhaps see flying 
 against the blue sky a flag with the colors of 
 the Calverts; colors worn, too, in the Mary- 
 land thickets by the Baltimore oriole. But 
 the eye will come back to the gray pledge of 
 Maryland's loyalty, the first memorial set up 
 in the whole country to the great Washing- 
 ton. 
 
 The column is perhaps of no great intrinsic 
 beauty, its proportions have even been de- 
 scribed by the irreverent as "dumpy," but any- 
 thing so skillfully placed would have an effect, 
 and, in fact, the shaft has the solemn, yet 
 good-natured, dignity of which the eighteenth 
 
Baltimore 135 
 
 century and the first quarter of the nineteenth 
 knew so well the trick. It has very definitely 
 "an air." You take off your hat to it, with 
 some show of old-fashioned politeness, and 
 you realize that you are in a "gentleman's 
 town." 
 
 Mount Vernon and Washington Places 
 form a Maltese cross of green, in which there 
 are statues of local men of note, a Barye lion, 
 and some good bronze groups of Peace and 
 War contemplating a scene now so manifestly 
 devoted to the former. Down the hill in front 
 goes a path broken by steps, statues, and a 
 fountain, and bordered by green bushes and 
 rose-trellises. There is a pleasant legend of 
 a gay return from the ball, when, to win a mad 
 bet, a famous belle of an earlier day plunged 
 into the marble basin of the fountain, a lovely 
 naiad in a satin frock. Such memories, how- 
 ever, do not disturb the present decorum of 
 the scene. Indeed, from the foot of the hill, 
 to see the Father of His Country keeping 
 guard over his city of Baltimore is a se- 
 renely solemn thing. You remember that it 
 was over Fort McHenry down the bay that the 
 star-spangled banner floated which inspired 
 our national song, sung for the first time in the 
 old Holliday Street Theatre, on a site where 
 you may now hear the villain of modest- 
 priced melodrama tear a passion to tatters. 
 
136 American Towns and People 
 
 Curiously enough, however, for all the 
 memories of '76 and 18 12, there is scarcely a 
 town in the country which still so definitely 
 keeps its English characteristics and seems so 
 to have preserved the continuity of its tradi- 
 tions. The mere names of the streets are a 
 delight. Alpaca Alley, Apple Court, April 
 Alley, and Apricot Court — the alphabet be- 
 gins well. There are, of course, the names 
 which suggest history, Calvert and Howard 
 Streets, and Cathedral Street shedding peace. 
 Also Charles Street, which, humorously 
 enough, is prolonged by Charles Street Ave- 
 nue, and this by Charles Street Avenue Ex- 
 tension. But there are also Crooked Lane, 
 Comet Street, and Crab Court, Cuba Street, 
 China Street — remember the days of Balti- 
 more clipper-ships — Featherbed Lane, and 
 Fawn Street. Friendship is a street, an alley, 
 an avenue, and a court. There is Lovegrove 
 Alley now, and there used to be Lovely Lane. 
 Johnny-Cake Road still leads to Johnny-Cake 
 Town. Jew Alley, Madeira Court, Maiden 
 Choice Lane, Nero Alley, Pen Lucy Avenue, 
 Pin Alley, Plover Street, and Plum Row — 
 can London itself do better? And naturally 
 there is Petticoat Lane. Plowman Street, 
 Sarah Ann Street — but the list already gives 
 the authentic British flavor of Baltimorean 
 nomenclature. 
 
Baltimore 137 
 
 Charles Dickens noted the British quality in 
 the Baltimore of his day. 
 
 "The most comfortable of all hotels in the 
 United States," he says, "is Barnum's, where 
 the English traveler will find curtains to his 
 bed, for the first and probably the last time 
 in America." 
 
 There is more, not complimentary to the 
 rest of the country, about finding enough 
 water for washing in the bedrooms. And 
 it is possible to argue about the good of bed- 
 curtains. Still, as a contemporary bit of evi- 
 dence on our special point it is interesting. 
 
 There has never been a great foreign popu- 
 lation in this part of Maryland, beyond a re- 
 spectable sprinkling of Germans. The names 
 above the shops are largely English names, 
 and the faces in the streets are for the most 
 part American faces, a state of things un- 
 known to the present generation in such towns 
 as Boston, New York, or Chicago. It has 
 been easy, under such conditions, for old cus- 
 toms to survive. Even in the newspapers old 
 phrases still are found. An auctioneer, for 
 example, advertises the sale of furniture be- 
 longing to "a well-known family now declin- 
 ing housekeeping." Madeira and port are 
 still occasionally drunk in Baltimore from 
 the ancestral cellars of old-school gentlemen 
 living about Mount Vernon Place, and, until 
 
138 American Towns and People 
 
 lately at modest wine-dealers' bars by the or- 
 dinary clerk or artisan, who everywhere else 
 in the country would have either fuddled him- 
 self with spirits or ruined his digestion with 
 ice-cream sodas. Occasionally, as happens in 
 America, can be found a custom long passed 
 by in the older country. You might hunt the 
 length and breadth of England without find- 
 ing what you may see in Baltimore, the sign- 
 board of a barber who professes himself 
 ready to do ^'cupping and leeching," this 
 queer eighteenth-century trade surviving al- 
 most at the very gates of the great Johns Hop- 
 kins Hospital and its modern medical school. 
 
 At the top of the steps up to the monument 
 you perhaps saw a colored vendor of flowers, 
 making a gay patch against the green and 
 gray. He was probably the only flower mer- 
 chant from whom it would be the correct 
 thing to buy at that place. For there is al- 
 ways in Baltimore one shop to which one 
 should go. Immemorial custom, the con- 
 tinued patronage of the gentry, have settled 
 where you must purchase everything, from a 
 fresh tgg to a tiara. Yet the other shops have 
 a trim and satisfactory air, and somehow the 
 respectability of those of a prosperous county- 
 town in England. 
 
 The English connection was a close one in 
 the early days, even after the Revolution. 
 
Baltimore 139 
 
 The daughters of one single family became 
 the Marchioness of Wellesley and the Duchess 
 of Leeds. You could find some beautiful por- 
 traits, by painters such as Sir Thomas Law- 
 rence, both of Baltimoreans of that day and of 
 their friends across the Atlantic, friends 
 highly placed and famous, in the deserted and 
 dusty rooms which used to house the His- 
 torical Society. The hillside street where the 
 rather depressed-looking mid-Victorian build- 
 ing of the society stood was one of the few in 
 Baltimore which seemed forgotten and dilapi- 
 dated. No one appeared to visit the pictures, 
 almost no one the library, where a few readers 
 lurked in the gloom to which you penetrated 
 to see an admirable portrait of Washington. 
 To the romantically inclined, these visitors 
 there could be no others than the last repre- 
 sentatives of proud but decaying Baltimorean 
 families. Indeed, to a sympathetic eye the 
 town constantly suggested, quite as it should, 
 the persistence of a colonial aristocracy. 
 
 There are legends, of course, as there are in 
 every Southern town, illustrative of the pride 
 of birth, all charming stories, but mostly of 
 one pattern. There is one house, however, of 
 which they tell you tales a little dififerent. It 
 belonged once to a family of Portuguese Jews, 
 emigrants from a country where their race, 
 more than anywhere else in the world, traces 
 
140 Americati Towns and People 
 
 its lineage back into the mists of immemorial 
 antiquity. They were strict religionists, even 
 maintaining a private synagogue in their 
 house near the very street where the Cardinal 
 may still occasionally be seen taking the air. 
 They were proud socially, too, and were re- 
 ceived on equal terms by the Gentile aristoc- 
 racy. Their odd pathetic story is of the 
 gradual dying out of the family. They were 
 too orthodox to marry any but Jews, they were 
 too well-born to condescend to any of their 
 fellow religionists in this country. The 
 daughters, strictly reared in the family re- 
 ligion and the family pride, faded one by one 
 to spinsterhood, all but one lovely girl, of 
 whom they tell the romantic tale that she ran 
 away — and was forever forgotten. For a time 
 mesalliances on the part of some hot-blooded 
 son preserved the name. Then finally it was 
 lost, and only these queer memories survive. 
 
 The numberless antique-furniture shops 
 will, naturally enough, provide daily tales of 
 an impoverished lady just on the point of part- 
 ing with exactly the piece you were looking 
 for. And though you may have a moment's 
 suspicion that the whistling and hammering 
 in an upper room come from a cheerful Ger- 
 man-American workman now fabricating — 
 and "antiquating" — the furniture of this un- 
 
Baltimore 141 
 
 happy gentlewoman, if you have a nice nature, 
 you will believe in her. 
 
 It is paintings, however, the sale of which 
 is oftenest accompanied by all the eccentricity 
 which is the privilege of a long-existent so- 
 ciety. There was a Vandyck, if you please, to 
 be had one spring at the best ladies' hair- 
 dressing establishment, and a Murillo on sale 
 in the parlor of an employment agency. You 
 might believe in their authenticity or not, as 
 you liked, but there they were. And there is 
 even more. 
 
 There was to be found in one of the least- 
 frequented corners of the town an extensive 
 collection of paintings, which had not spared 
 the Italian, English, Dutch, French, nor Span- 
 ish schools of art. It was on sale — after a 
 fashion. That is to say, it was not offered, but 
 to any one who might casually stumble on it, 
 the owner would confess, with some hesitancy 
 and shyness, that she would like to turn it 
 into money. She was a pleasant, middle-aged 
 lady, dressed in a fashion that somehow made 
 you think of Godey's Ladies' Book. She was 
 no professed connoisseur of art. But her 
 father was fond of paintings, and these "used 
 to be about the house." She was always fond 
 of the Murillo, but she herself liked the blue 
 of the Titian better before the picture was re- 
 
142 American Towns and People 
 
 painted by that Italian from New York who 
 did so much cleaning up for her father. (As 
 to the Titian she was unmistakably right. As 
 things now stand the version of the same sub- 
 ject in the Uffizi at Florence is the better 
 painting.) Still, she liked the pictures, all of 
 them, and was not modern enough to be 
 troubled by any doubts as to their authenticity. 
 Indeed, had not the portrait of the Dauphin 
 of France been recognized as such by several 
 visitors unmistakably foreign, and possibly, so 
 she suspected, emissaries of the French gov- 
 ernment? And did not an agent of the Boston 
 Museum of Art once obtain access to the col- 
 lection disguised as a steel-worker on strike? 
 There was a local expert of some skill in this 
 matter of paintings, and it was once delicately 
 hinted to the lady of the collection that if he 
 were to examine and guarantee her pictures 
 their sale might be easier. She, bless her for 
 it! drew herself up delicately, and made an 
 answer which the sentimental tourist himself 
 could never have invented and put in the 
 mouth of any proud aristocrat. 
 
 '*I scarcely think his opinion could be very 
 valuable," she objected. "His family lived 
 near ours for many years, but we did not visit 
 them." 
 
 The writer did not wish for the local ex- 
 pert's opinion, either. He believed in the au- 
 
Baltimore 143 
 
 thentlcity of every canvas, and only wished he 
 could buy them all. 
 
 The new Baltimore risen from the ashes of 
 1904 is praiseworthy but not picturesque. 
 The energy, however, and the progressiveness 
 behind it are an essential part of the town's 
 character. They had the first water-works 
 here, the first lighting by gas, the first tele- 
 graph, and the first great railway. And it is 
 just this blend of the enterprise so generally 
 termed Northern with the easy Southern ac- 
 ceptance of the pleasant things of life which 
 gives Baltimore its special note. These and 
 another perfectly individual thing, the town's 
 fashion of being a great port of the sea. 
 
 Baltimore is, if one may put it that way, the 
 most inland of places at which you may take 
 ship. Though through at least half the town 
 there is the pervasive sense of salt water and 
 sea-borne traffic, it is not of the Atlantic that 
 one thinks. It is true that Baltimore's ships 
 plow the waves of that and other, remoter, 
 oceans. But Baltimore is the Chesapeake 
 Bay's. 
 
 There Is a pretty little park called Federal 
 Hill — a fortified encampment of Northern 
 soldiers during the Civil War, now a pleasant 
 sunny promenade, with grass-plots, trees, and 
 flowers in huge stone vases — from which you 
 get the best view of the harbor, the Patapsco 
 
144 American Towns and People 
 
 River stretching away in many miles of long, 
 lazy curves toward the great bay. Below you 
 lie sailing craft, and down where the channel 
 deepens you can catch sight of the funnels of 
 great liners. At the left the harbor ends in a 
 narrow basin, almost enclosed by the land, and 
 there at the levee the bay steamers lie. Every 
 morning and evening they start, big boats for 
 Norfolk and lesser craft for every branch of 
 that wonderful great bay, for every broad 
 river that penetrates tide-water Virginia and 
 the eastern and western shores of Maryland. 
 Small, battered, puffing antiquities they often 
 are, these Chesapeake steamers, depositing you 
 finally in the middle of the night or at dawn 
 at some remote, unknown up-river landing. 
 But only by such irregular, almost illicit 
 means of communication can you reach queer 
 towns forgotten by the railways, old manor- 
 houses where one may imagine old furniture, 
 old wine, old-fashioned hospitality, and old 
 gentlefolk to exist as they did a century ago. 
 Indeed, one may imagine anything about the 
 Chesapeake and its shores, for they are un- 
 known and forgotten. Lately the richness of 
 the agricultural lands has begun to attract 
 settlers again. Not all of Baltimore's immi- 
 gration goes West now. By the water-front 
 you may occasionally see a flat-bottomed, snub- 
 nosed boat starting, loaded with a whole 
 
Baltimore 145 
 
 colony of German farming families, for St. 
 Mary's County or the Eastern Shore. 
 
 The levee, alive with hurrying passengers, 
 and colored stevedores and roustabouts mov- 
 ing at lesser speed, is always tempting the 
 sentimental tourist to embark upon strange ex- 
 plorations. Who would not see the Nanti- 
 cote, the Choptank, the Wicomico River? 
 Who does not long for the Patuxent, the Poco- 
 moke, and the reaches of Tangier Sound? 
 Then there are as w^ll the West and the 
 Severn rivers, with stately residences on their 
 green banks, and Annapolis, that loveliest of 
 little capitals. There are boats that go up 
 that broad Potomac to Washington, or slowly 
 mount the Rappahannock and the York rivers, 
 taking you into the very heart of that forgotten 
 Virginian country. And always there is in 
 Baltimore the haunting sense of this great con- 
 tributory province, land of unknown possi- 
 bilities and fading memories. 
 
 Concretely, it is the great bay and its shores 
 which pile Baltimore's markets high with the 
 best and cheapest food our country knows. 
 The Chesapeake itself sends "fruit of the sea" 
 — to borrow a pleasant Italian phrase — of 
 every description, and from a very early 
 spring to a late autumn the market-gardens 
 and the orchards of Anne Arundel and St. 
 Mary's, counties pleasantly named, pour fruits. 
 
146 American Towns and People 
 
 and the freshest vegetables from a real horn of 
 plenty. You may eat Maryland peaches as 
 early as June, and Maryland strawberries as 
 late as October. And the air above is the 
 chosen haunt of game-birds actually eager to 
 be roasted over the fires of Baltimore. The 
 phrase must be repeated again, ''gastronomic 
 center of America." For the grateful city 
 quite unreservedly avails itself of its advan- 
 tages; it seems to be in a perpetual carnival 
 of marketing. 
 
 It is not merely that in Baltimore's clubs 
 and in the houses of her aristocracy is "good 
 cheer" so abundant as to be famous. Every 
 one knows the tales of feasting, and has heard 
 the legends of high betting on races between 
 favorite terrapin, devoted to sport during the 
 half-hour before they enter the pot. Rare old 
 wines, incomparable oysters, snowy crab- 
 flakes, ruddy canvasbacks — all these help to 
 compose a picture of mellow tone. But what 
 is even pleasanter to contemplate is the high- 
 heaped larder of the humblest Baltimorean. 
 
 Of course it is not possible for the casual 
 observer to be behind every kitchen stove and 
 under every dinner table in so large a town; 
 he must trust to his observations in the market- 
 place and to what chance acquaintances of the 
 streets and shops can tell him. But he sees 
 the humblest baskets go home filled to over- 
 
Baltimore 147 
 
 flowing with things which are luxuries else- 
 where. He knows that the moderately cir- 
 cumstanced can eat soft-shell crabs by the 
 dozen, and the really impoverished buy 
 oysters by the barrel. He will spend happy 
 mornings lounging about the low, rambling, 
 picturesque markets. Here at dawn country 
 wagons still lumber in from the great high- 
 roads with "garden-truck," and in the late 
 afternoon go home with tired but happy 
 parties of marketers in rustic clothes and real 
 sunbonnets. Here is a never-ending, cheerful 
 confusion, and the satisfying sense that no one 
 is going hungry. 
 
 Indeed, Baltimore, among great cities, 
 would seem to be the paradise of the small in- 
 come. Nothing is perhaps really cheap in 
 this country nowadays, but by comparison life 
 in the Maryland metropolis is actually within 
 the reach of all. Supplies, to employ the term 
 most comprehensively, are abundant. 
 
 In all Baltimore there can scarcely be more 
 than a few score "apartment buildings"! 
 This statement is meant literally, not as a pic- 
 turesque exaggeration; though for a New- 
 Yorker, for example, it is only by a far flight 
 of the imagination that such a condition 
 of things can be conceived. Baltimore is, 
 broadly speaking, still a city of small houses, 
 the pleasantest large settlement of the moder- 
 
148 American Towns and People 
 
 ately rich and the moderately poor in our 
 whole country. There is plenty of money in 
 Baltimore, but there are few great fortunes; 
 the plutocrats do it there on a modest ten mil- 
 lions, and in something considerably less pre- 
 tentious than. a New York or Chicago palace. 
 The standard of expenditure is low. 
 
 On a modest working-man's income you 
 might and perhaps may still live in a delight- 
 ful toy-like little red-brick house with fresh 
 paint, green shutters, and the whitest of white 
 steps. Your house may be only ten feet wide 
 and a story and a half high, but it is a digni- 
 fied, self-respecting habitation, and your castle 
 as no flat can ever be. Near you, in whatever 
 quarter of the town you may live, are probably 
 pleasant squares planted with wide-branching 
 trees, or streets gay with grass-plots, flower- 
 beds, fountains, statues. Only in Baltimore 
 do such boulevards run through regions of the 
 tiniest, simplest houses. All this, if you are 
 to view towns with some wish for the well- 
 being and happiness of humanity, makes 
 Baltimore a really comforting place. 
 
 There is still more matter for philosophiz- 
 ing in these charming slums. To the senti- 
 mental tourist it seems impossible to overesti- 
 mate the artistic; ethical, and sociological 
 effect of the white doorstep, which in both 
 Philadelphia arid Baltimore is the most prorn- 
 
Baltimore 149 
 
 inent feature of the urban scene. Ideally, it 
 is of marble; failing this, of fair planks of 
 wood. There it stands, ready to be scrubbed 
 each morning, to be painted each spring. It 
 is the outward and visible sign of thrift, neat- 
 ness, a kind of guarantee that within, too, there 
 are cleanliness and all the domestic virtues. 
 And happily for Baltimore, with the excep- 
 tion of a few sinister and ill-omened new 
 streets in the outskirts, the white doorstep is 
 universal. It adorns wealth. It mitigates 
 poverty. It will be an evil day for Baltimore 
 when she gives up this emblem of her civil- 
 ization. 
 
 All that can be said about the comfortable 
 situation of the Baltimorean applies, perhaps 
 more strikingly, to that of the black Balti- 
 morean. There is no intention here to discuss 
 the South's problem. But the sight of streets 
 of good three-story houses occupied, in appar- 
 ent peace and prosperity, by the Negroes, who 
 have bought a whole respectable white neigh- 
 borhood, is at least interesting evidence in the 
 case. And from the point of view of the in- 
 dividual quality which it gives Baltimore, the 
 money the Negroes get is spent, much of it, in 
 heightening the "local color" by the gayest 
 garments. 
 
 This is no article comprehensively descrip- 
 tive. If it were, there would be a catalogue 
 
150 American Towns and People 
 
 of old buildings, itineraries — to parks where 
 grass-grown earthworks of the war of 181 2 
 sleep in the sunshine, and old manor-houses 
 that are now pavilions around which children 
 play and idlers like the sentimental tourist 
 lounge — and innumerable serviceable hints 
 for the stranger. But all that it hopes to do 
 is to stimulate some one's curiosity, to detain 
 some passer-by, and perhaps to point out to 
 some native, whose eye has grown dull from 
 custom, what a delightful town he lives in. 
 Indeed, all over the country there is great need 
 that justice should be done to the indigenous 
 sights. For so many years we have done 
 ample justice, and more, to Europe, that the 
 moment may be coming to pause occasionally 
 by the side of some lovely fragment of our 
 own past, to meditate upon the fact that the 
 unnoted years as they go by are making us an 
 old country, and that over the face of our civil- 
 ization is creeping a richer, more romantic 
 bloom. Some day that famous traveler from 
 New Zealand will be prowling among our 
 eighteenth and nineteenth century relics. Is 
 it not to be hoped that before he discovers us 
 we may discover ourselves? And as a begin- 
 ning must be made somewhere, why not at 
 Baltimore, sitting at once modestly and 
 proudly by her great bay of Chesapeake, and 
 putting pleasantly before you her long history 
 
Baltimore 151 
 
 of an American town? She can prove to any 
 one who will give her half a chance what a 
 good, a dignified, a charming thing it is to be 
 an American town. 
 
Is There a West? 
 
 THE Eastern heart dilates immediately on 
 crossing the Mississippi. You have been 
 told that the air is freer and fresher; that the 
 old, silly, social stiffness is to drop from you 
 in the warmth of an indigenous bonhomie; 
 that every fellow-passenger is a potential 
 friend, even perhaps for life. And all this 
 really is so; there is a social magic at play 
 even in the Pullman car, and the train, flow- 
 ing westward, leaves behind it a black cloud 
 of Eastern inhibitions, like a trail of smoke. 
 Then gradually you realize that the new 
 friends who have so unconventionally and so 
 hastily clasped you to their bosoms are all also 
 Easterners, intoxicated with the breeziness of 
 the plains. This first gives you pause. 
 
 Some cynic of the smoking-room tells you 
 that Los Angeles is the metropolis of Iowa and 
 backs up his paradox by figures proving that 
 a great part of its citizens originate under the 
 government of Des Moines. Once your sus- 
 picions are aroused you are, even during the 
 railway journey, intent upon anything which 
 might serve as proof that there really is a 
 
 153 
 
154 American Towns and People 
 
 West. These indications are not too fre- 
 quent; the continent was, only lately, crossed 
 with so poor a result as only three prairie-dogs 
 sighted, and one superannuated cowboy of 
 about eighty, who was obviously either a sur- 
 vival, a mere museum piece, or some decrepit 
 Easterner galvanized into this fancy-dress 
 parade by his memories of Buffalo Bill. The 
 West suddenly becomes shadowy and elusive. 
 
 There is, of course, a Middle West; it is as- 
 tonishing to find that it now extends as far 
 as Utah, where in Salt Lake City an enter- 
 prising junk company proclaims itself "the 
 largest in the Middle West." The West, if it 
 exists, has already been pushed beyond the 
 High Sierras. It only remains to discover 
 whether or not it has been shoved into the 
 Pacific and safely out of American life. 
 
 The West, in the old sense of anything 
 cruder, less civilized, rougher than the East, 
 is unquestionably gone. There is a bathroom 
 to each hotel bedroom, and the younger Eng- 
 lish poets lecture in all the smallest towns. 
 It takes an eagle's eye to find the traditional 
 lack of cultivation, and few Easterners, at any 
 rate, have eagles' eyes. This question of "cul- 
 ture" may as well be disposed of now and 
 flung out of our way ; it impedes our westward 
 progress. As you advance toward the Pacific, 
 "culture," if anything, only takes on a more 
 
Is There a West? 155 
 
 passionate, almost exacerbated quality, as 
 though its possessors were determined to prove 
 to the scoffing how brightly the piously 
 guarded flame burns on the sunset altar to the 
 muses. For decades daughters of the Cali- 
 fornian aristocracy have been educated in 
 Paris at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. 
 The French note is indeed firmly struck in the 
 West. You find small children, who, reared 
 by foreign governesses, are more at ease with 
 the Latin languages than with their own. 
 And, to choose but one very symptomatic ex- 
 ample, nowhere did the temporary cessation 
 lately in U Illustration of the publication of 
 the latest plays upon the Parisian stage cause 
 greater discomfort and emptiness of life than 
 in California. As for the volumes of our 
 latest poets and vers-libristes, they lie even 
 thicker upon library tables in California than 
 in Kansas. Universities dot the plain, and 
 one of the world's great libraries is soon to be 
 among the orange-groves near Pasadena. 
 Culture Is certainly not treated rough near the 
 Pacific's shore. 
 
 Bret Harte was, and Alfred Henry Lewis. 
 Their West is gone. Yet there remains Cali- 
 fornia, which, though certainly not Western 
 as we once used the word, is most Californian. 
 And Californianism Is something as amazing 
 and as dififerent as Westernism can ever have 
 
156 American Towns and People 
 
 been In that earlier day. It is a subject which 
 would well repay years of loving and intent 
 study, and demands, indeed, space and some 
 epic gift of style, yet must be treated here 
 briefly and as best may be. The gospel of im- 
 pressionism is in the end the only defense of 
 any alien writer attempting to describe a social 
 landscape; he sets the thing down as it looks 
 to him. 
 
 The Californians, in spite of their compara- 
 tive hauteur in the Pullman, are accessible 
 enough. Many of them, even on the transcon- 
 tinental trip, may be "met." Indeed, they 
 travel freely, constantly, and easily to and fro, 
 making nothing of four nights out to Chicago, 
 and training their infant progeny, as may 
 richly be observed in the train, to the same 
 happy facility of movement. (It should be 
 said, parenthetically, that as far as that goes, 
 all over the country motherhood seems merely 
 to incite American women to travel, by prefer- 
 ence in sleeping-cars.) These returning Cali- 
 fornians have been East for various alleged 
 purposes of business or pleasure. But it is 
 really as missionaries that they have gone, to 
 bring the bright gospel of Californianism to 
 those benighted races which still persist in liv- 
 ing east of the High Sierras. 
 
 The universal delusion of the Pacific slope 
 is that California is heaven. And indeed 
 
Traces of old Spain have a winning, half pathetic charr 
 
Is There a IF est F 15^7 
 
 there is so much to support the theory that it 
 merits calm and judicial examination. The 
 beauty of the Californian landscape is indis- 
 putable and heavenly. The combination of 
 sea and mountains with the adorable valleys 
 which diversify it beneath an almost perpetu- 
 ally cloudless sky, the great woodland regions, 
 the majesty and wonder of the High Sierras 
 — all these are unrivaled, unmatched by any- 
 thing in our land. There is a curious Medi- 
 terranean quality in the country; one loses one- 
 self inevitably in golden memories of Greece, 
 of Italy, and of the sunburned coast of Spain. 
 Something classic, too; under that crystalline 
 air everything is sharply modeled. Marble 
 temples should crown the hills, and in the 
 glades nymphs disport themselves. Claude 
 should have lived to paint this land, to do jus- 
 tice to its serene perfection. 
 
 Serenity is perhaps the most striking char- 
 acteristic of the Californian scene — the sun 
 shines, a faint breeze blows gently, and the 
 hills lie in the clear light as if nothing on them 
 had stirred since they were first chiseled in 
 brown or green. There is nothing wayward 
 or mysterious about the landscape. The air 
 is too crystalline to bear upon it tangs and 
 odors. You have moments of thinking that 
 there is no air; that all California is broad, 
 kindly vacancy filled with sunlight and no 
 
158 American Towns and People 
 
 more. To the sense of serenity is added the 
 feeling of remoteness. In certain moods the 
 Californian climate, even at its loveliest, seems 
 wholly impersonal, if one may venture upon 
 that expression. 
 
 The Californian dooryards everywhere are 
 a riot of tropical and sub-tropical blooming 
 plants; perhaps nowhere in the world is there 
 anything like the lushness of their growth and 
 the profusion of their blossoming. To any 
 flower-lover these are gardens in paradise. 
 Yet in no sense is California the tropics. 
 Even when the days are hot the nights are 
 most often crisp and cold. There is no 
 languor in the air. The night breeze does not 
 whisper of the dark magic of the South, of 
 hot passions and unbridled pleasures. It is 
 not, in short, the Californian zephyrs which 
 fill the Californian divorce courts. Instead, 
 they seem clean, properly sterilized, even cold- 
 storage airs. 
 
 The Pacific, too, a calm, cold ocean not 
 much fretted by traffic, adds its curious note 
 of aloofness. It sends forth fogs, but some- 
 how they carry no hint of salt. And in days 
 of sunshine when it sparkles sapphire blue it 
 seems somehow to exhale no breath. You 
 never "smell the sea" as by the Atlantic's 
 verge, and, though you well know that rotting 
 seaweed gives forth that odor, you miss it on 
 
Is There a West? 159 
 
 this western shore. The oceans you have 
 known seem playful children, by turns gay and 
 irritable, by comparison with this monstrous, 
 lovely, inhuman sea. If you are by fate pre- 
 destined to Californianism, you find in this 
 eternal changeless quality a suggestion that 
 happiness, too, may be everlasting, and that 
 behind the mountains you have left forever 
 change and whim and anxiety and all the re- 
 sponsibilities of the past. 
 
 The first impression of California must be 
 for every one a sense of release, whether it be 
 merely from the winter climate of Iowa or 
 from the carking cares of the eastern seaboard. 
 Every one is, as it were, under a new flag' and 
 a new name, ready to forget the past and keep 
 clear eyes fixed only on the future. Here 
 every earthly care may be sloughed of¥, except, 
 perhaps, the pangs of love. And as for physi- 
 cal ills, these should easily be disposed of. 
 On every hand there are faith healers of all 
 [varieties, divine healers, nature healers, and 
 child healers, these last an agreeable novelty 
 ranging from ten to fourteen years in age, but 
 competent, no doubt, as only an American 
 .child can be. 
 
 I The Californian population has been re- 
 cruited from all parts of the country and, 
 though happy in this new environment, still 
 bears traces of its origin. A Boston lady, 
 
i6o American Towns and People 
 
 lately viewing a parade in honor of the sover- 
 eigns of Belgium, said it made her feel at 
 home to "see all them silk hats"; yet she was 
 doubtless a converted and ardent Californian, 
 finding this in her old age a pleasant shelter 
 from the east wind. 
 
 One of the pleasantest things about Cali- 
 fornia (perhaps, after its natural beauty) is 
 the simplicity of life so widely prevalent there. 
 Of course there are plenty of enormously rich 
 people, and quite enough extraordinarily gay 
 and fashionable. Yet in the end it is the para- 
 dise of the common people and the small in- 
 come. Even when the immigrant to Cali- 
 fornia comes with work in his mind it is so 
 often some sublimated and poetic industry like 
 orange-growing which has lured; the culture 
 of that golden fruit, with Mexicans or Japa- 
 nese doing the manual labor, is an ideal, easy, 
 and Arcadian occupation for any one. 
 
 The bungalow should be the emblem of 
 California, it represents the state at its sim- 
 plest and most engaging best. It Is the great 
 triumph of native art, triumphantly ugly 
 sometimes, sometimes triumphantly gay and 
 coquettish. When the architects of other 
 states, less bungalowish, need models they visit 
 the Pacific coast for inspiration. Indeed, the 
 Californian bungalow is the prettiest imagi- 
 nable proof that there is a modest and simple 
 
Is There a West? i6r 
 
 and self-respecting life to be led in Arcadian 
 surroundings, embowered in bloom, and that 
 the servantless home is both decent and agree- 
 able. 
 
 In this matter of the elimination of the ser- 
 vant — and so of the servant problem — if one 
 may trust the report of Californian house- 
 waives, the state has gone further than others in 
 the direction desired by all advanced and 
 radical advocates of the suppression of class 
 distinctions. Broadly speaking, they will tell 
 you, there are no servants in California. It is 
 hard to believe of the palaces, though you hear 
 yarns of mid-Western millionaires assisting 
 their wives with the dishes or sweeping out the 
 gorgeous corridors of their castles. In the 
 two-room bungalow (three rooms make it al- 
 most a house) a servant would only be in the 
 way. 
 
 How can one fear any future social convul- 
 sions once one has learned how delightful it is 
 to eat in the kitchen, in a charming little stall 
 with benches, like those in the Old Cheshire 
 Cheese in London, only now trig and gay 
 with white and colored paints. Every most 
 modern device for the harnessing of gas, 
 water, and the electric current you are apt to 
 find in the tiniest bungalow temple of the 
 simple life. Why dislike washing the clothes 
 when a machine does it? What is ironing but 
 
l62 American Towns and People 
 
 play when the ironing-board lets down from 
 the wall at the touch of a button and an elec- 
 tric iron, ever hot, stands temptingly to your 
 hand? 
 
 Of course there are plenty of rich people in 
 California — the sight-seeing automobiles take 
 you past miles of "homes," all th-e seats of lum- 
 ber, paper, packing, chewing-gum, or sawdust 
 "kings," as we so delightfully term all our suc- 
 cessful business men in America. But the 
 really exciting and significant thing is to go 
 past the hundreds of miles of "homes" of those 
 humble people who are not and never will be 
 "kings," never, perhaps, be masters of any- 
 thing but their own souls, but are leading a 
 serene, neighborly, American existence. It is 
 in this mood that the bungalow seems the solu- 
 tion of all the difficulties of even a revolution- 
 ized future. California seems somehow to 
 offer every tired human creature from that 
 humming, tormented East a refuge and a new 
 chance. 
 
 The simplicity of life pervades the whole 
 social structure. There are in the Californian 
 cities large general-market stores on the main 
 shopping streets, just next the jewelers' and the 
 picture-palaces and the milliners' modes de 
 Paris. There is an enormous deal of market- 
 ing in person, and, incredible as it may sound 
 to Eastern readers, there appears to be some at- 
 
Is There a West? 1 63 
 
 tempt to attain low prices in the belief that 
 they will attract Californians as high prices do 
 New-Yorkers. After doing your marketing 
 you may repair to dine, at about five-thirty or 
 a leisurely and fashionable six, to a cafeteria, 
 where again self-service is the desired goal. 
 These establishments are enormous and in that 
 vast, flashing elegance of style which they have 
 borrowed from the hotel "office." There are 
 luxurious waiting-rooms where you keep ren- 
 dezvous with the party with whom you are to 
 cafeteer. Bands blare away, and in certain 
 advanced futuristic establishments there are 
 balconies with easy chairs where even those 
 not dining are welcome to sit and enjoy the art 
 of music. 
 
 Nature-loving is of course a cheap and 
 simple pleasure anywhere, but it peculiarly 
 fits into the scheme of Western frugality and 
 soulfulness. Of course California has no 
 monopoly; even in central Illinois bands of 
 nature-lovers now go forth on Saturday after- 
 noons to caress trees. But probably never be- 
 fore in the same area were so many almost pro- 
 fessional devotees of the Great Mother as on 
 the Pacific slope. There is, of course, a vast 
 deal of rather windy talk upon the subject, 
 and a strong disposition to dilute it with a 
 vague religiosity. Even rich and fashionable 
 ladies at Santa Barbara are apt to yearn a good 
 
164 American Towns and People 
 
 deal over the beauty of the landscape, spiritu- 
 ally to fondle Rincon, the local mountain, 
 and, in short, to feel that this close contact 
 with nature is making both soul and body very 
 lovely. 
 
 But there is a side simpler and more engag- 
 ing. There is an extraordinary proportion of 
 the inhabitants of California which knows the 
 wild places — they are always astonishingly 
 near the centers of population — and has been 
 near the mysteries. The coming of the good 
 road and the bad car has facilitated this. The 
 migration in the summer to the High Sierras 
 of thousands of family camping-parties, in 
 overloaded vehicles of the many kinds which 
 may be generically grouped as tin cars, is an 
 epic of democracy. They live long weeks 
 really close to that so famous heart; a young 
 lady was heard in the autumn complaining 
 that she couldn't seem to cook at the sea-level 
 — she had learned the art during a long sum- 
 mer twelve thousand feet up, where water 
 boils at a lower temperature and is much less 
 hot! Camping and all the pioneer crafts are 
 still a real part of the life of a true Californian 
 from childhood on. 
 
 Even week-ends and Sundays are used in 
 pleasant outdoor expeditions. In spite of the 
 automobile, the Californians can still walk. 
 Of course they do not use such an old- 
 
Is There a West? 165 
 
 fashioned expression; they "hike"; this new- 
 word, as Boy Scouts have already found, 
 makes a thing that had grown dull a real 
 pleasure. The railway and trolley stations 
 late Saturday afternoon are an amazing sight. 
 They swarm with boys and girls in "hiking" 
 costumes of khaki. The young ladies are all 
 in trim, tight knickers, to be distinguished 
 from the young men only by their superior 
 shape, by their beauty of countenance, and 
 by the students' caps in bright colored 
 velvet which surmount them. There are un- 
 doubtedly more young ladies in knickers in 
 California than anywdiere else in the world. 
 In some cases there is a woman in skirts along; 
 this strange raiment possibly indicates the 
 chaperon, though more often it would appear 
 that the expedition is undertaken in that Ar- 
 cadian lack of guile which is still so strong a 
 national characteristic. Did Daphnis and 
 Chloe "hike"? The young ladies are almost 
 always, by a mysterious but welcome dispen- 
 sation of Providence, small and exquisitely 
 pretty — indeed, they look like moving-picture 
 actresses, which is, of course, the highest Cali- 
 fornian praise. And the whole scene has a 
 quality of musical comedy which is gay and 
 invigorating. 
 
 Indeed, while we touch this point, it may 
 be said that Californian costume, more par- 
 
i66 American Towns and People 
 
 ticularly that of the male, is very free from 
 any conservative or traditional restraint. It 
 may be that in the south the mode is affected 
 by the presence of a great number of actors — 
 a race always sprightly and debonair in dress. 
 For example, it is probable that in Los 
 Angeles there are more black-and-white- 
 check suits per square mile than in any other 
 city in the world. Sartorial imagination 
 seems positively unbridled; what a French 
 tailor would, so accurately, call costumes de 
 fantaisie are excessively prevalent, and all that 
 can be done with belts and waists and curves 
 and gussets and gores and strapped and plaited 
 waistcoats is done. Fits are, to display the 
 perfect male figure, alluringly snug — a lead- 
 ing Eastern authority says that the impression 
 he receives is that every one is wearing the suit 
 made for little brother! The note, not uni- 
 versally but still most commonly struck, is not 
 that of stern simplicity. It is actually a fact 
 that in one great Californian city a perfectly 
 plain white dress shirt is not to be purchased 
 in any reputable men's furnishing shop, the 
 mode being for a touch of embroidery or plait- 
 ing or pique. Dashing fellows, these Cali- 
 fornians! 
 
 As bungalows and dress and the whole 
 manner of Californian life indicate an eye 
 wholly fixed on the future, so does the Cali- 
 
Is There a West? ibj 
 
 fornian language. English as she used to be 
 spoken is in process of being scrapped in Cali- 
 fornia — or perhaps it is only that institutions 
 which never existed before demand names as 
 fresh as themselves. "Cafeteria" has, of 
 course, now a nation-wide use, but there is also 
 an "Eateria" and, in one instance, welling 
 straight from our strange, turgid, national 
 fount of humor, a "Palace of Fine Eats." 
 "Grocerteria" is very much in use everywhere, 
 for a shop where "self-service" is in vogue. 
 "Shoeitorium" and "Shinerium" are delight- 
 ful and easily understood, as is "Vegeteria" 
 for a wayside vegetable-stall. "Hometeria" 
 as the designation of a real-estate office is per- 
 haps fancy spun rather fine and flung rather 
 far. But for a stroke of individual inventive 
 genius it would be hard to beat "Rabbi- 
 torium," the mart for these succulent animals. 
 The language never grows rusty out West. 
 
 The Spanish past of California, is, of 
 course, much advertised and carefully con- 
 served. The little towns and the string of 
 missions were perhaps not very important in 
 those early days; they must have seemed re- 
 mote and provincial to the proud City of 
 Mexico. And the relics which one so ten- 
 derly and piously visits are, as things go in the 
 world, relatively unimportant — in Spain itself 
 one would perhaps not cross a very broad 
 
l68 American Towns and People 
 
 Street to see them. But here in America we 
 are hungry for the past, and the Californian 
 traces of old Spain have a very v^^inning, half- 
 pathetic charm. They complete the romantic 
 illusion that these are Mediterranean lands. 
 
 And modern California has done every- 
 thing to keep the old Spanish province every- 
 where in mind. There are "mission" plays 
 and "mission" groceries and "mission" garages 
 and, as all America knows to its sorrow, mis- 
 sion furniture. That famous and delightful 
 novel, Ramona, has become an authentic part 
 of California history by now, and every event 
 has been given a local habitat so that you can 
 make pilgrimages, pretty and romantic, to 
 every scene of the heroine's happiness and of 
 her final tragedy — a charming tribute to the 
 art of fiction. The town and street names 
 are so many of them reminiscent of that early 
 day, and the Californians, slipshod in their 
 English sometimes, are astonishingly careful 
 of their Spanish, undaunted by such names as 
 La Jolla, for example, and dealing com- 
 petently with the aspirate j and the liquid 
 double 1. The whole system of nomenclature 
 makes for romance, and the presence, as one 
 goes toward the south and the Mexican bor- 
 der, of increasing numbers of a darker, more 
 picturesque race deepens the impression 
 
Is There a West? 169 
 
 which one has at moments that one is in a 
 foreign land. 
 
 The Chinese and Japanese do that, too. 
 No discussion shall here ensue of that Asiatic 
 problem. Not as economist, but as idle tour- 
 ist, may one be grateful for such memories as 
 that of a carnation-field in bloom tended by 
 a half-dozen pretty little Japanese women, 
 bending caressingly over the lovely brilliant 
 flowers! 
 
 This, however, is a digression from Span- 
 ishness, and the point to be made was that 
 earthquakes and speculative builders have left 
 little in California of the period between the 
 mission and the bungalow. There is one lady 
 in southern California who is famous because 
 her grandchildren are being brought up in the 
 house where she herself was born! There is, 
 in short, nothing mid-Victorian in California, 
 unless it be possibly some aspects of the 
 famous San Franciscan vice — in that city the 
 rows of cabinets particuliers which adorn even 
 the humblest oyster-house inevitably make one 
 think of the Third Empire in Paris and the 
 Bal Mabille. 
 
 Reluctantly shall some space be here given 
 to this same question of Californian morals. 
 It is amusing how cultivated and dashing and 
 intelligent it is always thought in America 
 
170 American Towns and People 
 
 to attack towns as being puritanical. Los 
 Angeles was once termed "chemically pure," 
 and it still reels from the blow. The lowan 
 population would like it to be well understood 
 that life has been considerably jazzed up since 
 its transference to the coast. San Francisco 
 has, on the other hand, been perhaps too much 
 advertised by its loving but injudicious 
 friends, for it is quite plain to even the tour- 
 ist's eye that, instead of being the Isle of 
 Cytherea, the place is congested with good 
 and respectable women (often excessively 
 pretty and smart), and that it goes its way, as 
 a busy, lively city should, with not much more 
 nor much less of undue gayety than usually 
 falls to the lot of towns of its size. Yet up 
 and down the length of the state you hear 
 philosophical thinkers asserting that Cali- 
 fornia saps the moral sense. 
 
 (Here, indeed, one had best not be too sure 
 that the wish is not father to the thought. 
 There are ladies who have not succeeded in 
 being very bad in the East and, arriving at 
 full bloom and California about the same 
 time, have come with the hope of misconduct 
 springing eternal in their very human breasts.) 
 
 It is true that the Californian divorce courts 
 are by way of surpassing old days in Reno, and 
 that life in many a community proceeds with 
 great freedom and vivacity; that one-piece 
 
A superannuated cowboy of about eighty. 
 
Is There a IF est ^ ijl 
 
 bathing-suits are the rule, and that, to judge 
 by the photographs which embellish the chro- 
 nique scandaleuse of the local newspapers, 
 neither age nor plainness offers any bar to the 
 liveliness of ladies. But at the risk of defend- 
 ing Califarnians even against themselves, it 
 must be said if the state saps the moral sense 
 it is only in so far as it weakens all feeling of 
 responsibility and of dependence upon the 
 traditions of the past. 
 
 The visitor to California will inevitably ex- 
 perience moods in which the whole state will 
 seem to him populated merely by people who 
 have migrated thither to avoid responsibility. 
 He will forget the industries and the rich agri- 
 culture and consider the whole state as an idle 
 community, unproductive and non-creative. 
 He will in imagination see the tributary'' 
 stream of money from the working East cross 
 the mountains and break into pretty, many- 
 colored spray over the Californian lotos gar- 
 dens. He will wonder what would happen to 
 the West if the machinery of capitalism ceased 
 to divert this life-giving golden flow. He 
 will revolt at what seems the sterile happiness 
 of a whole people. 
 
 It is in such moods that one believes the 
 worst stories of the slowness with which Cali- 
 fornia awakened to the call of the Great War, 
 forgetting how, at home in the East, one was 
 
172 American Towns and People 
 
 bitterly impatient at the country's lethargy 
 and neglecting, perhaps, to inform oneself of 
 the splendid achievements of the aroused Cali- 
 fornia. Yet the mood, dissipated, will return, 
 of longing, even in the Californian sunshine 
 and beauty, for the cloudier skies of an older, 
 struggling, suffering world. 
 
 Reference has been made earlier to the prev- 
 alent delusion that California is heaven. And 
 here something must be said, in all rever- 
 ence it is hoped, about heaven. The Cali- 
 fornian resemblance is to that place of the 
 earlier theologies devoted wholly to the mystic 
 and rather static pleasures of worship and 
 praise, which most of the vigorous modern 
 churches reject in favor of an ideal of more 
 activity, more strain, more likeness to the life 
 of this world, though on a higher spiritual 
 plane. 
 
 A Californian might, however, well retort 
 that the higher spiritual plane already exists 
 by the Pacific's edge. Indeed, the soil of the 
 state is as fertile of religions as that of great 
 Asia. And, indeed, all the Asiatic cults find 
 a welcome there. In grand and beautiful 
 temples or in dull little frame houses on side 
 streets where a simple home-made signboard 
 gives modest publicity to a new religion de- 
 vised by the Inhabitant himself, all sorts and 
 all doctrines find some shelter. From a Sun- 
 
Is There a West? 173 
 
 day newspaper, which only partially reflects 
 the possibilities of a Californian Sabbath 
 morning, is copied out a list of services which 
 includes, besides the more orthodox names, 
 New Thought, Higher Thought, Metaphysi- 
 cal Theosophy of several different schools, 
 Pillar of Fire, Old Time Orthodoxy, God is 
 Female, and, though it is more a cultural ac- 
 tivity than a worship of the Deity, Raw Food. 
 By the western ocean all these new religionists 
 gather to await the coming of a new day. 
 Some of them believe that from the deep 
 bosom of the Pacific will arise a new con- 
 tinent, like the lost Atlantis. When this hap- 
 pens they will be there to step still farther into 
 the sunset, and to take possession of a newer 
 and better California. 
 
 There is more "soul" in California than 
 there has ever been before in the world's his- 
 tory. A tailor advertises: "All men wearing 
 tailor-made clothes should insist on getting a 
 soul with them. Every garment made in our 
 shops, including coat, vest, and trousers, is 
 provided with a real soul, the something that 
 lives forever and the something that is not ob- 
 tainable everywhere" 1 
 
 All these western religions are religions of 
 optimism; it is only natural that they should 
 thrive best in these remote, untroubled airs. 
 Their practitioners are relentlessly cheerful; 
 
174 American Towns and People 
 
 you can tell that almost professional smile and 
 that voice dripping with honey even in the 
 crowded street-car. Their lilac crystal domes 
 stand in fantastic loveliness above the western 
 sea. Why, in a land where the present pre- 
 sents no cares and problems, should not the hu- 
 man heart concern itself with some future life? 
 Is California itself not the future life? We 
 come inevitably to what we earlier called her 
 delusion. Perhaps the Californian serenity 
 is what the world is now trying for. In that 
 case our West is a great mile-stone on the 
 highroad of the human race. And when hu- 
 man cares are adjusted, then, as now, her hills 
 will turn green and brown and then green 
 again. And her sunshine will never have 
 ceased to flood her great calm spaces. And 
 her giant sequoias will have increased in girth 
 an inch or two — Perhaps in time that fabled 
 continent will rise from the Pacific's bosom. 
 But until a great deal is known about it most 
 of us will prefer California. 
 
The Hotel Guest 
 
 AMERICA invented the hotel and is 
 still inordinately proud of it. Europe 
 through the centuries produced, it is true, re- 
 freshment for man and beast, and comfortable 
 phrases about taking one's ease in one's inn. 
 But it remained for our country to contrive an 
 establishment where, if we may venture upon 
 an illogical but perhaps understandable ex- 
 pression, one took not only one's own ease but 
 every one else's; where privacy having been, 
 as far as possible, eliminated, the hotel guest 
 lived in a pleasant sociable democratic welter 
 of all the classes of the community. 
 
 In one of Long Island's prettiest coun- 
 try palaces, surrounded by formal gardens, 
 clipped hedges, espaliered pear-trees, and 
 pools made sapphire blue by the newest chem- 
 icals, filled with the loot of Europe, the main 
 living-room has a tessellated marble floor mel- 
 lowed with age which the owner whimsically 
 announces was secured not in some foreign 
 nobleman's residence, but at the demolition of 
 
 the metropolis's once most famous hotel. The 
 
 175 
 
176 American Towns and People 
 
 imaginative guest cannot tread it unmoved; in 
 the dim hours of the night he can hear the 
 ghosts of America's great days stirring upon 
 what was once its noble expanse, seeking their 
 favorite chairs or asking the clerk for wTiting- 
 paper. If a simple symbol for America is 
 sought, for that American America which 
 sprang into being with the Revolution, came 
 triumphant and reunited through the Civil 
 War and the Reconstruction days and has 
 lately uncovered and fanned into flame the an- 
 cient fires which still burned at her heart, 
 teaching her new foreign-born sons her old 
 love of liberty, perhaps nothing better can be 
 found than the old hotel office grandiose, al- 
 most epic in qualities with its stretch of 
 checkered black-and-white marble pavement 
 upon which America congregated. It was 
 what the Forum perhaps was to Rome, and if 
 majestic memories of the lobby of the Grand 
 Hotel in Cincinnati, seen in an impressionable 
 childhood, are at all to be trusted, about the 
 Forum's size. 
 
 The European mind is still completely be- 
 wildered by the free-and-easy and unques- 
 tioned use of the hotel and all its conveniences 
 by thousands who dispense with the formality 
 of lodging there or contributing in any finan- 
 cial way to its maintenance. A Saturday of 
 this last winter the office of one of New York's 
 
The Hotel Guest 177 
 
 most expensive and exclusive hotels became so 
 congested that hoarse-voiced uniformed at- 
 tendants kept shouting, "Keep moving," as if 
 they were policemen in charge of proletarian 
 crowds in the street. At such a moment ac- 
 tual guests of a hotel are intruding aliens. In 
 spite of all modern improvements and all pre- 
 tensions to affording an elegant privacy for its 
 guests, the American hotel remains to-day the 
 prey of the public, its office the public's lounge 
 and rendezvous. 
 
 There have been attempts to keep out of the 
 best hotels, not so much the local pulDlic as the 
 inhabitants of cheaper hostelries. In spite of 
 these, the frugal visitor to New York tradi- 
 tionally "put up" at a small hotel on a side 
 street and picked his teeth on the old Aster 
 House steps. And at the summer and winter 
 resorts to this day, guests of the boarding- 
 house calmly repair in bands to pass the even- 
 ing on the verandas of the best hotels, and it 
 is practically impossible to say them nay, so 
 firmly fixed in our national mind is the idea 
 that every part of a hotel not actually locked 
 up is public property. 
 
 To lounge in a first-class office confers a 
 certain position. Even in the most modern 
 hotels young gentleman socially ambitious are 
 said to gain at little expense a most desirable 
 publicity by having themselves "paged" (de- 
 
178 American Towns and People 
 
 lightful word) in the public rooms and restau- 
 rants at the most crowded hours. 
 
 Another of the common people's inalienable 
 rights is to know who is staying in a hotel, 
 hence the pitiless publicity of the register. 
 This volume is indeed at times the center of 
 hotel social life, its perusal the daily pleasure 
 of hundreds. In the earlier days, wits found 
 their opportunity here. At Trenton Falls, a 
 once famous but now almost forgotten resort, 
 this passage in the register was much liked: 
 
 John Graham and servant. 
 
 G. Squires, wife and two babies. No ser- 
 vant, owing to the hardness of the times. 
 
 G. W. Douglas and servant. No wife and 
 babies, owing to the hardness of the times. 
 
 Even though you neglect the opportunity 
 to turn a pretty phrase, perhaps the only way 
 to make sure that your name is down correctly 
 is to write it yourself. Memories come back 
 to all of us of strange mistakes in foreign ho- 
 tels. And it is well to remember the dignified 
 and respectable Bostonian writer on musical 
 subjects whose arrival at Tunis in North 
 Africa was recorded in the little local Gazette 
 des Ktrangers et du Casino as that of Le Mar- 
 quis A — . de Boston et sa Suite. 
 
 The Ladies' Parlor, alas, has gone, to make 
 
The Hotel Guest 179 
 
 way for the cabaret grill-room where the la- 
 dies may smoke and drink pink cocktails; but 
 for the better part of that great nineteenth cen- 
 tury it was a prominent and agreeable feature 
 of hotel life. All the foreign visitors of that 
 earlier ante-bellum period — whose inevitable 
 books of impressions are an ever more fasci- 
 nating store of information as to the manners 
 and customs we derive from — were by turns 
 horrified and bedazzled by the amiable and 
 accessible society in the hotel parlors. Below, 
 in the office, the rough male inhabitants of 
 the Republic swore and chewed and spat, but 
 above, American ladies, beautifully dressed in 
 Parisian frocks, held a decorus but animated 
 court. In Europe, no such public reception- 
 rooms existed, no such nightly assemblage of 
 guests inclined to sociability. In Europe, no 
 families lived permanently in hotels, and this 
 publicity of home life added, for the stranger, 
 to the wonder of the experience. 
 
 Miss Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish lady fa- 
 mous enough in her da*y, but now quite for- 
 gotten, may be quoted to advantage on the 
 parlors of the Astor House: 
 
 Magnificent drawing-rooms with furniture 
 in velours, with mirrors and gilding, brilliant 
 with magnificent gas-lighted chandeliers and 
 other grandeur stand open in every story of 
 
l8o American Towns and People 
 
 the house for ladies and gentlemen who live 
 here or are visiting here, to converse or to rest, 
 talking together on soft and splendid sofas or 
 arm-chairs, fanning themselves, and just as if 
 they had nothing else to do in the world than 
 to make themselves agreeable to one another. 
 Scarcely can a lady rise than immediately a 
 gentleman is at hand to offer her his arm. 
 
 The last touch is admirable. This is in 
 1849, in what might perhaps be thought a 
 roguish period in America's manners, yet it 
 is humbly submitted that the picture of the 
 Ladies' Parlor of the Astor House compares 
 favorably with that of any salon of that eight- 
 eenth century in France, the period which is 
 said to have been for the privileged classes 
 the most agreeable this planet has yet pro- 
 vided. Even the most belle marquise could 
 have hoped for nothing more courteous than a 
 gentleman immediately at hand to offer his 
 arm almost before she could rise. 
 
 This is perhaps the point to meet any pos- 
 sible challenge as to the importance of such 
 facts and such philosophizing. Here is not 
 history stately and proud, only some pleasant 
 odds and ends which may help to make her 
 great pages more comprehensive and more hu- 
 man. European history has many collateral 
 volumes of gossip and agreeable minor infor- 
 
The Hotel Guest l8l 
 
 mation. So, too, has our earlier Colonial pe- 
 riod. But there is a stretch of this nineteenth 
 century to know which better and more fa- 
 miliarly would make Americans more at home 
 in their own continent, would certainly enrich 
 the tone of our national culture, and would 
 perhaps even heighten our love of country. 
 Nihil Americamim mihi alienum — a serious 
 plea is made here that even the times of the 
 now despised house with a cupola deserve our 
 afifectionate, if half-humorous attention; that 
 indeed a record of any of our manners and 
 customs, such as is planned in this series of 
 scattered articles is, though both light and 
 humble, still a genuine contribution, at least 
 memoirs, to serve for the writing of our na- 
 tional history. 
 
 While there is still time, every one should 
 see the Ladies' Parlor of a certain famous 
 hotel at Saratoga, still coquettish with gilt 
 mirrors and ragged blue brocade, and should 
 make the pilgrimage to an equally famous inn 
 at Niagara Falls, if only to see the fat old 
 leather-bound registers in which honeymoon 
 couples with imagination still occasionally 
 hunt to see where father and mother, or 
 more probably grandfather and grandmother, 
 signed the book on their wedding-trip — where 
 they, too, may see when Abraham Lincoln 
 brought his bride to the Falls. Here is his- 
 
iSz American Towns and People 
 
 tory intimate and sweet, the grave muse ready 
 to make friends with any idle sentimental tour- 
 ist. 
 
 The colonial inn, though pleasant with 
 memories of travelers by coach and of solitary 
 and gallant horsemen, is still perfectly in the 
 English tradition. Revolutionary days when 
 French officers visited us as they do now, are 
 fuller of delightful anecdote. The Marquis 
 de Chastellux, on leaving a New Jersey inn, 
 writes : 
 
 I observed to Mr. Courtheath that if he 
 made me pay for being waited on by his pretty 
 sister, it was by much too little, but if only for 
 lodging and supper, it was a great deal. 
 
 They had a way with them, did those 
 Frenchmen! It was said of the young Prince 
 de Broglie, traveling about that time, that he 
 "managed very well by kissing the landladies, 
 so he got clean sheets and no other traveler 
 to sleep with him!" It is interesting to look 
 over General Putnam's bill at the Cromwell's 
 Head Tavern and notice the curious distribu- 
 tion of his expenses. His board cost him two 
 pounds eight shillings for the week, his liquor 
 sixteen shillings, and his washing ninepencel 
 
 All this European character disappeared in 
 the first few decades of the new century. In 
 
The Hotel Guest 183 
 
 that dark age the Simon-pure American hotel 
 with elegant Ladies' Parlors, huge offices, 
 shining cuspidors, and rocking-chairs on the 
 sidewalk, came mysteriously into being, and 
 the foreign traveler was inevitably transported 
 with amazement, often with horror, at living 
 in daily association with three or four hun- 
 dred people. One European traveler asserted : 
 "Americans love crowds. There are even 
 more twins born there than anywhere else." 
 Size indeed developed early. At Trenton 
 Falls, N. P. Willis saw with amazement two 
 thousand wild pigeons fattening for the hotel. 
 The hotels in towns were larger than anything 
 the world had ever known before; hotels in 
 such resorts as Saratoga were monstrous, un- 
 believable. Turmoil came, too; a large hotel 
 is described as one of the class "entitled to 
 keep a gong," and as early as the 'fifties, bands 
 played loudly in the Cape May dining-rooms, 
 and hundreds of black waiters marched in 
 with each course in military order. There is 
 at Cape May a Homeric legend of a battle 
 royal between white gentlemen and black 
 waiters on strike! 
 
 The foreign visitors expressed horror often 
 enough, but the legend of American uncouth- 
 ness was, quite obviously, exaggerated to give 
 spice to their narratives. In 1843 the famous 
 English actor, Macready, records that he went 
 
184 American Towns and People 
 
 with Longfellow and the Willises to dine at 
 what he quaintly terms the "Ladies' Ordi- 
 nary" of a New York hotel. 
 
 "I looked for the eaters with knives," he 
 ingenuously and honestly says, "but detected 
 none." 
 
 Mrs. Trollope, whose attacks on us roused 
 such bitterness, is to-day somewhat discred- 
 ited. We must simply decline, for example, 
 to believe that in her day it was considered 
 so indelicate for the sexes to sit together on the 
 grass, that picnics were impossible. Indeed, 
 do we not know from equally reliable wit- 
 nesses that at this same period at the New 
 Jersey seaside a gentleman asked a lady, 
 "May I have the pleasure of taking a bath 
 with you?" as he would have solicited the 
 favor of a dance, and that in the waves the 
 sexes mixed with a freedom which makes the 
 story of the contemporaneous squeamishness 
 about a picnic quite improbable? 
 
 In this mysterious period of development, 
 early in the century, a new hotel language was 
 invented, and strange, inexplicable terms had 
 birth. 
 
 "Why do you call me Front?" asks the new 
 bell-boy in the farce. "Why don't you call 
 me Grimes?" 
 
 "I don't know," the clerk candidly answers. 
 "It's always done in first-class hotels." 
 
The old hotel office was vhat the forum perhaps v\/a.s to Kome. 
 
The Hotel Guest 185 
 
 A traveler naturally must grow excited 
 about something and find fault with some for- 
 eign custom. How else is he to know that he 
 is abroad? Of this importance, and no more, 
 are the anecdotes of visitors recoiling before 
 the awful sight of boiled eggs ''mashed in a 
 glass" and the remark of Thackeray after try- 
 ing his first American oyster, that he "felt as 
 if he had swallowed a baby." 
 
 There is no intention here of going into the 
 long chapter of American difficulties with 
 European hotels. We have been as violent 
 over the folly of the French and Italians in 
 not serving an American breakfast as ever 
 their travelers have been over our eccentrici- 
 ties. Any one who has tried to play courier to 
 an inveterately American friend can under- 
 stand how difficult it is, say, in a remote Brit- 
 tany hamlet, to obtain Smithson's Breakfast 
 Food, or whatever it is which adorns the home 
 table in Kansas City, and how hard it is to 
 induce a landlady at Vallombrosa to fry the 
 morning beefsteak to a turn. On the whole, 
 foreigners visiting us have borne the reversal 
 of their immemorial habits with fortitude, 
 even good nature. 
 
 Instead of cause for horror, the travelers, 
 it is evident, often found a strange, exotic 
 charm in the American hotel. The waiters 
 were invariably black, the chambermaids in- 
 
1 86 American Towns and People 
 
 evitably Irish. On the sidewalks in front of 
 New York hotels, Cuban planters rocked. 
 The society in the Ladies' Parlors sparkled. 
 In the dining-rooms Gargantuan menus of 
 strange foods tempted and satiated every ap- 
 petite. Ice-water clinked and indigestion 
 stalked. Pale, precocious children compe- 
 tently ordering their own dinner tore soft- 
 shell crabs limb from limb, gnawed green 
 corn, and consumed limitless ice-cream. It 
 was indeed the New World. 
 
 Until Mr. Hoover, quite lately, took the 
 matter in hand, almost nothing had ever 
 checked our national extravagance, and the 
 hotel, as perhaps the freest flowering of our 
 institutions, excelled in wastefulness, both for 
 the guests and for the casual public. In some 
 Florida hotels, up to a comparatively recent 
 period, great baskets of oranges for free eat- 
 ing stood in the offices, while in the early an- 
 nals of Wisconsin you may read of a custom 
 of serving free whisky to all guests, more 
 especially if the house was so crowded that 
 many of them had to be put to bed upon the 
 floor — a custom that will become more golden 
 in memory as the prohibition years go by. 
 
 Even to-day, when time has somewhat 
 curbed us, the ideal of the American hotel is 
 perhaps a famous establishment in the country 
 near New York where you pay a fixed sum a 
 
The Hotel Guest 187 
 
 day (fixed out of the reach of most of us) , and 
 the hotel provides everything you can think of 
 to want — cigars, champagne, riding-horses, 
 motors, fishing parties, picnics in the moun- 
 tain-top, dances, private theatricals, and prob- 
 ably even that monstrosity, a feather bed, if it 
 suited your convenience. 
 
 The constant outcry of the American tourist 
 abroad used to be not so- much against high 
 prices as against the itemized bill. Mr. Nat 
 Goodwin, in the farce, said, "No, this is not 
 my hotel — yet; I am buying it on the instal- 
 ment plan." The charge for candles in Eu- 
 ropean hotels did more to promote interna- 
 tional discord than almost anything else that 
 ever happened abroad. At home in America 
 we are happy only when soap is provided and 
 talcum powder and wash-cloths to take away, 
 and sample bottles of mouth wash and tiny 
 tubes of cold cream, when the supply of towels 
 is limitless and the hot water gushes like the 
 Great Geyser of the Yellowstone. At table, 
 our ideal is to stoke up between courses on 
 celery and olives and salted nuts, and discover 
 peppermint candy hiding beside the finger- 
 bowl, and to find nothing of all this on the 
 bill. 
 
 And yet, in the end, in spite of itself, the 
 American public was betrayed. It was found 
 that hotel life could really be made more ex- 
 
l88 American Towns and People 
 
 pensive by charging for rooms and meals 
 separately; the old ideal was sacrificed to this 
 greater and more alluring extravagance. You 
 began to pay for your room alone more than 
 in the grand old days of the "two, three, or 
 four dollar a day house" you paid for it plus 
 three banquets a day, and at meal-times to sub- 
 ject yourself to the extortions of an a la carte 
 restaurant with alleged French waiters. Of 
 course, it was possible to use this new system 
 for economy — there were people from the 
 Waldorf breakfasting at Childs' — but in the 
 main it served extravagance. 
 
 There was a transition period when the two 
 plans sometimes existed alongside in the same 
 hotel. There is a story, if not true, at least 
 agreeably contrived, of Mr. Israel Zangwill 
 registering in Chicago and being astonished by 
 the clerk's asking him, sharply: 
 
 ^'European or American?" 
 
 "I'm European," he replied, "but I don't 
 see what business that is of yours!" 
 
 Gradually, however, the so-called Eu- 
 ropean plan (in the early idiom it was often 
 pronounced with the accent on the second 
 syllable) became almost universal in city 
 hotels of standing. Even the least refined 
 commercial traveler is now revolted by the un- 
 New-Yorkishness of the old American plan, 
 which is now surviving vigorously only in 
 
The Hotel Guest 189 
 
 country and resort hotels (and the visitor to 
 our crowded watering places knows that even 
 there its hold is precarious). 
 
 If the hotel is, as it were, the barometer and 
 thermometer of national civilization, it is the 
 commercial traveler who most often takes the 
 readings. Let no one underestimate his im- 
 portance in the nation's structure. In Charles 
 H. Hoyt's early farce, "A Bunch of Keys," 
 Dolly, complaining, draws a most racily 
 American picture. "Ever since the hotel was 
 closed," she says, "I've had a most miserable 
 time. There's been no drummers along, and 
 I've had nobody to flirt with but brakemen." 
 She would be glad, were she in a newer play, 
 to recognize how her friend has improved the 
 hotel. The drummer is the hotels' best regu- 
 lar patron. He supports them when the 
 traveler for pleasure cannot be counted upon. 
 He knows metropolitan comfort and is willing 
 to pay for it, or at least to put it on the ex- 
 pense account. Some of the new hotels in the 
 new South frankly acknowledge their in- 
 debtedness. "The hotel the traveling-man 
 made possible," is the phrase which calls for 
 our gratitude. We must not think of him 
 lightly; even in the hotel bedroom the free 
 copy of the Bible has been provided by the 
 "Gideons," an association of piously inclined 
 gentlemen of the road. In England the 
 
190 American Towns and People 
 
 "commercial room" may still exist for the 
 segregation of the fraternity, and it may be 
 that in hotels in small Italian towns female 
 travelers are still given private dining-rooms 
 rather than that they should be exposed to as- 
 sociation with the commercial travelers in the 
 main sala da pranzo. But in America, the 
 most delicately nurtured women gladly follow 
 them to the grill-rooms and lounges on the 
 New York plan which they have demanded 
 everywhere. Tablets honoring the drummer 
 should indeed be placed on the walls of every 
 new and comfortable hotel. 
 
 The process of civilizing the hotel wilder- 
 ness occasionally leads the most sophisticated 
 products of New York and Paris to the lone- 
 liest frontier posts. In a central New York 
 hotel, there was a few years ago a French head 
 waiter of that engaging suavity which makes 
 life's troubles melt away. Asked one day at 
 lunch to convey to the chef a compliment upon 
 a really notable supreme de sole, Marguery, 
 he sighed delicately and then said : 
 
 "Yes, he is an expert and admirable man. 
 But he will not last long as a cook. What will 
 you?" he continued with a little weary shrug. 
 "How can he sustain his art among a clientele 
 which really only wishes a planked beef- 
 steak?" 
 
 How can a head waiter last, we may well 
 
The Hotel Guest 191 
 
 ask, whose advice is sought only to decide per- 
 haps between French-fried and hashed-brown 
 potatoes to go with the ham and eggs? 
 Martyrs each to the cause of American good 
 living! The story of a Dieppe boy comes into 
 the mind, too, who made a failure as manager 
 of an ambitious French restaurant in a pre- 
 tentious new hotel in an obstinately ham-and- 
 tgg town, whose pretty young wife was made 
 love to by a local auto-tire manufacturer, and 
 who finally put a bullet through his head, dis- 
 couraged, beaten, and lonely for the pretty gay 
 town where pleasant little old hotels went on 
 in the good traditional way, and where a 
 small, sure, happy life would have been his 
 had he been content to stay at home by the 
 blue French sea. This is probably the only 
 record which will ever be made of Raoul. 
 There is a mother in France who remembers 
 him, if she be still alive. It would be pleas- 
 ant if she could for a moment believe that 
 America was grateful for the small service her 
 boy tried so hard to do for his adopted coun- 
 try. 
 
 The transformation which the motor-car 
 has effected in the hotels of the American 
 country is already a twice and thrice told tale, 
 and yet no bird's-eye view of the hotel guest 
 can omit the sight of him and his womankind 
 in strange masks and hideous wrappings ap- 
 
192 American Towns and People 
 
 preaching Ye Olde Inne and demanding 
 rooms with bath. More wayside taverns have 
 been plumbed into a new existence than any 
 one could ever have believed Colonial traffic 
 could have sustained. As for historic mem- 
 ories, they are a cloud, like dust along an un- 
 oiled dirt road. One can motor for weeks and 
 always lie the night where Washington once 
 slept. Our national past has surged back, and 
 what with "innes" and tea-rooms, quaintness 
 is in danger of becoming a pest. 
 
 There are, however, certain developments 
 in this new roadside hotel-keeping which 
 should be set down by any serious student of 
 our manners. The amateur landlady, an ar- 
 tistic gentlewoman in a sage-green woolen 
 gown, cut low over a neck artistically hung 
 with amber beads, is something which only 
 the Anglo-Saxon world can produce. She 
 tends to serve food in green bowls and there is 
 nothing in the animal or vegetable kingdom 
 which with the aid of a bottle of mayonnaise 
 she cannot whip into a salad. Her passion is 
 for daintiness, in which is comprised, thank 
 God, cleanliness. She has a pretty taste in all 
 the arts, and indeed a stay under her roof can- 
 not fail to be mentally and spiritually tonic. 
 She is an agreeable, if faintly comic, figure; 
 we should value her as the impersonation of 
 a passionate revolt against the dullness, the 
 
The Hotel Guest 193 
 
 unpicturesqueness of the old American coun- 
 try hotel of the last half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. And our new American quaintness, 
 brought about by skilled architects, trained 
 landscape-gardeners, and sophisticated in- 
 terior decorators can successfully challenge 
 comparison with any of the Old World's 
 cleverness. 
 
 Novelists and playwrights have for some 
 time encouraged the hotel run by an eccentric 
 local "character." After Frank Stockton told 
 us of the Squirrel Inn, some enterprising per- 
 son immediately started one so named, and 
 now every one who saw the play in New York 
 last winter wants to go this summer to a hotel 
 kept by "Lightnin'." We are tolerant of 
 fantastic landlords; there is a Floridian hotel 
 where the host plays Chopin on the parlor 
 piano while a soviet of servants and guests 
 runs the establishment. 
 
 In the new town hotels, the guest asks not 
 quaintness, but a kind of communal grandeur. 
 The new establishments are fabulous. They 
 provide special floors for bachelors, and, for 
 ladies traveling alone, a chaperon-matron. 
 They have club-rooms for Spanish-Ameri- 
 cans, Indian chefs for the curries, stenogra- 
 phers, notary publics, Turkish baths, safe-de- 
 posit vaults for the guests, their own artesian 
 wells, manicurists among whom Helen of 
 
194 American Towns and People 
 
 Troy would be unnoticed, roof gardens, sub- 
 terranean dancing-rooms, cigarettes for ladies, 
 red-tipped so that the lip rouge may not rub 
 off and show, private detectives, house osteo- 
 paths and divorce la\\'yers, gymnasiums on the 
 roof, playgrounds for children, swimming 
 baths, jazz and symphony bands, near-bars 
 and soda-fountains, their own valets and 
 tailors, ladies' maids, packers, ticket agents 
 and scalpers, blackmailers, night guides, and 
 almost everything except surgeons' rooms for 
 major operations and wet nurses for children 
 born in the hotel. Once safely within the 
 doors of a modern hotel, there is really no need 
 of one's ever leaving it, except for the last sad 
 rites, and possibly the hotel could take care of 
 even these. The hotel is the epitome of the 
 nation, even to the elaborate system of mirrors 
 and electric signals cunningly hidden beneath 
 the velvet carpets by means of which the es- 
 timable matrons on each floor are enabled to 
 supervise and preserve the morals of the na- 
 tion. 
 
 We went through a period when it was no 
 longer quite ''the thing" to live in a hotel. 
 But now that domestic servants in private 
 houses are rapidly disappearing, if not already 
 gone, it appears likely that the hotel is about to 
 engulf the American world. In New York 
 last winter, new hotels were opened at a rate 
 
The Hotel Guest 195 
 
 which increased the available bedrooms at 
 some preposterous rate, perhaps a thousand a 
 week, and yet the town every day was filled 
 with frenzied, despairing people vainly hunt- 
 ing for places to lay their heads at night. 
 Waiters struck, imperial-mannered waitresses 
 took their place, and yet the one universal de- 
 sire in New York seemed to be to live in a 
 hotel. When we consider, as indeed we had 
 best do, the possible complete passing away in 
 the not distant future of all private and 
 domestic service, this rush of a whole people 
 to hotels becomes epic in quality and signifi- 
 cance. American hotels have always put un- 
 believable splendor within reach of the whole 
 community. And as every change prepared 
 by our radicals and revolutionists is in a sense 
 an extension of this principle, the hotel is per- 
 haps the symbol of the future, a people's 
 palace in the office of which the proletariat 
 takes its ease. 
 
 Meanwhile, counter to this great principle 
 of democracy, hotels, like their guests, have 
 developed social position and snobbishness. 
 Nowhere so much as in America is the hotel 
 a man — or, more particularly, a woman — 
 stays at taken as a kind of public manifesto of 
 his or her social pretensions. There are still 
 left in the land a few hotels dedicated to the 
 service of the old-fashioned, elderly rich 
 
196 American Towns and People 
 
 where decorous, hushed service and meals on 
 the old American plan may still be obtained. 
 Only recently a visiting Englishman, who by 
 some strange chance had gone to one of them, 
 asserted that he left because in the whole hotel 
 there was no place where his post-prandial 
 cup of coffee and cigarette might be enjoyed 
 together. In the dining-room he might have 
 his cup of coffee, but he could not smoke. In 
 the lobby he could smoke, but could not be 
 served coffee. 
 
 In the newest hotels, of course, ash-receivers 
 are hung over the edge of the bath-tubs, and 
 the general tone is well in advance of even the 
 future, though, of course, women are per- 
 mitted not to smoke. In such establishments 
 the tone of fashion is very aggravated, and it 
 is curious to notice how nearly impossible it 
 is for many of the patrons to endure life in 
 any hotel less the mode. In the case of the 
 most successfully snobbish of the metropolis 
 caravansaries the situation at the outbreak of 
 the Great War was curious. Although the 
 frock-coated young gentlemen at the desk were 
 hurriedly transformed into Swiss, many of the 
 waiters suddenly became Belgians and the 
 chambermaids irreconcilable Alsatians, the 
 boche tone was there and it became one's duty 
 to forsake the hotel. For a brief period it lost 
 a little patronage. Ambassadors of the Al- 
 
The Hotel Guest 197 
 
 lied powers were forced to go elsewhere. 
 And yet, so desperate was the habit of regard- 
 ing it as the only truly fashionable place to 
 stay that many of the most passionate pro- 
 Ententists remained in spite of everything. It 
 was asserted that the hotel was filled with Ger- 
 man spies and that valets from the Wilhelm- 
 strasse went through your luggage regularly 
 every day. One martyred American gentle- 
 man was forced to confide the packet of his 
 personal letters from British royalty to the 
 care of a lady who put them in her country 
 safe-deposit vault. And yet, in spite of perse- 
 cution, it did not occur to him to change 
 hotels. 
 
 What does this prove except what passion- 
 ate devotion a good hotel may inspire in its 
 guests, and, indeed, all the members of the 
 surrounding community? A very prominent 
 New-Yorker got his start in the world when 
 in Chicago he wrote for a local paper a thril- 
 ling account of how one bitter January day 
 the clerk at the newest hotel had met the com- 
 plaint of an Englishman who could not get 
 the water in his morning tub cold enough to 
 be invigorating, by having great blocks of ice 
 placed in it. The story was conceivably not 
 true, since water drawn in mid-winter from 
 Lake Michigan might un-iced well bring a 
 glow to the most vigorous British body, but 
 
198 American Towns and People 
 
 all Chicago was delighted at this humorous 
 and fantastic statement of how an American 
 hotel stood ready to provide whatever the 
 guest demanded. It is no bad idea for 
 patriots to rally round the American hotel. 
 It has been one of our country's great con- 
 tributions to the modern world. 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 
 
 ENRAPTURED visitors to our Pacific 
 coast sometimes wonder why a Icindly 
 Providence sheds upon that land eternal sun- 
 shine. There is, however, but one answer to 
 that question — so that you can shoot the mov- 
 ing pictures there. Of course you can shoot 
 the pictures elsewhere, even in New York, 
 though the weather often shows an incompre- 
 hensible disregard of what is really due them. 
 But many other things happen in New York; 
 indeed, one is often in danger of forgetting 
 what is of real importance in the world. 
 This is not satire; it is only the movie point 
 of view, amazing, but quite natural. 
 
 They make the pictures at a place called 
 Hollywood — the name may be considered as 
 symbolic, since there are also activities else- 
 where. Now Los Angeles, which is the best- 
 known suburb of Hollywood, indeed only a 
 few miles away by the trolley, is rapidly be- 
 coming one of the largest cities in the world. 
 We must of course wait for the census to be 
 sure, but it has quite possibly already passed its 
 
 199 
 
200 American Towns and People 
 
 rival, San Francisco, and it confidently pre- 
 dicts that it will soon have the most numerous 
 urban population west of the Mississippi. It 
 is not claimed that all these people are in the 
 movies; there must be hundreds of thousands 
 of unfortunate creatures there who have no 
 connection with them. But the pictures are, 
 for all that, the one preeminent industry of the 
 great town ; they are its obsession, its sun and 
 moon. 
 
 In Los Angeles there are a few cave-dwel- 
 ling ladies (to borrow a Washingtonian 
 phrase) who, deeply intrenched in West 
 Adams Street, the local Faubourg St.-Ger- 
 main, still struggle to maintain the idea that 
 one may be Angeleno and yet be scornful, or 
 even ignorant, of the movie world. They are 
 magnificent, but they fight a losing fight. 
 
 They gain no support from the distin- 
 guished visitors from out of town, who indeed 
 fly to the studios like homing doves. And in- 
 deed when real royalty arrives, as nowadays 
 may happen in a republic, they know quite 
 what it is in California they want to see. 
 Only recently several thousand amiable and 
 blameless school-children waited in the broil- 
 ing sun for hours, massed in the form of the 
 stranger's national flag, while some miles away 
 at the world's heart a real king and queen met 
 even more real movie kings and queens, whose 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 201 
 
 rule knows no boundaries. Blood is indeed 
 thicker than water. 
 
 Of course in the social fight against movie 
 people there are naturally dark and desperate 
 stories of dissipation always abroad. If she 
 believed them, no lady, faubourg or otherwise, 
 could fail to react unfavorably. But such 
 legends grow only too easily. We cannot be 
 quite sure that the stars give parties so wild 
 that at regular intervals during the long night 
 the local police pass through the rooms and 
 tearfully plead with the hostess to moderate 
 the gayety of the guests — of course no mere 
 policeman would dare give actual orders to a 
 really important movie artist. If such parties 
 take place, those who attend them may be 
 felicitated upon seeing Babylon and Imperial 
 Rome revived. But rigid investigation dis- 
 closes the fact that many a Hollywood social 
 evening consists merely in the decent yet pleas- 
 urable experience of hearing some moving- 
 picture director tell the other guests how great 
 he is. In any case these rumors of an ex- 
 tremely full free life scarcely stem the tide of 
 stellar popularity. 
 
 It is in vain that gallant golfers rule that no 
 moving-picture actor shall join their most ex- 
 clusive club. The movie artists merely found 
 a new club, and with the loose change in their 
 pockets buy expensive land and lay out a new 
 
202 American Towns and People 
 
 course. What are trifling changes in the land- 
 scape to them? Any day they may see the 
 tangle of a sub-tropical garden modified by 
 the studio landscape specialists so that it be- 
 comes the rocky path in the Canadian North- 
 west where the hero and heroine first meet and 
 love. 
 
 It is equally useless for proud and reaction- 
 ary owners of furnished houses to refuse to let 
 them to lovely little blonde moving-picture 
 queens. All these ladies have to do is to tele- 
 phone somewhere and give the order, and on 
 some hill near by palaces rise in the next week 
 or month or so. Why should not the builders 
 from the studio do the job in their off time? 
 What is even an imperial villa to men who 
 have perhaps just that afternoon finished Cleo- 
 patra's boudoir where soon the lovely star will 
 entice the world? The houses which owners 
 decline to rent to the moving-picture people 
 are pointed out to you as among the historic 
 sights of the region, but even on the "Seeing 
 Hollywood" automobiles they excite only de- 
 risive laughter. 
 
 It is not being worldly-minded to say that 
 it is absolutely no use trying to treat as lepers 
 those who are rising upon an irresistible tide 
 of success. It is a little as if you stood upon 
 the bank of the Mississippi which was so in 
 flood as to threaten to engulf your home and 
 
Stimulating a vampire with strains from Strauss. 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 203 
 
 snobbishly said that you did not care to make 
 the acquaintance of a river so common and 
 possibly so wayward. 
 
 You may possibly, at a Los Angeles dinner- 
 party, keep the conversation off the pictures 
 while the soup is being served; after that it is 
 difficult. As to the people on the street-cars, 
 in the cafeterias and the hotels, they shame- 
 lessly adore the topic. They turn to the movie 
 stars as sunflowers to the sun. From ten thou- 
 sand thousand altars incense burned to the 
 favorites streams toward the unstained Cali- 
 fornia blue. And the United States postal 
 service might reasonably excuse its breakdown 
 by making a statement as to the number of 
 letters received daily by the adored ones from 
 every quarter of the civilized and uncivilized 
 globe. 
 
 A good day will bring by the morning post 
 to a really beloved movie actress as many as 
 eighteen hundred and sixty-seven letters from 
 unknown remote worshipers. And there are 
 times when the chief secretary for personal 
 letters and her corps of undersecretaries and 
 stenographers faint beneath the burden. The 
 letters are infinite in variety; they range from 
 those of simple admiration and gratitude for 
 assuagement of soul, to the definite statement 
 that the writer h leaving East Esopus by the 
 ten-twenty train on Monday and would like to 
 
204 American Towns and People 
 
 marry the object of his affections as soon as 
 possible after his arrival by the Santa Fe on 
 Saturday. The colossal scale of the movies 
 may be somewhat guessed at by the fact that 
 there are always at the Los Angeles hotels 
 gentlemen who have just come to marry the 
 leading movie actresses or to reclaim the 
 lovely but evil vamps. 
 
 Parenthetically, something more should be 
 said about these letters which are read, 
 answered, and then turned over for study and 
 tabulation by the business-office experts, who 
 are, by this time, more widely learned in hu- 
 man nature than the professors of psychology 
 in our colleges. The "appeal" of each star is 
 reduced to figures, and the results guide the 
 future choice of plays for the protagonist of 
 this correspondence. Some odd things are 
 discovered. It is asserted that a certain 
 famous and virile gentleman is proved by the 
 statistics to be loved chiefly by ladies between 
 forty-two and fifty, and that consequently his 
 scenarios must be constructed especially to de- 
 light this age in the sex. Another is the chil- 
 dren's darling. Another the ideal of "clean- 
 cuf" American youth. It is quite possible 
 that there are figures available which would 
 show what chiefly is the delight of cocaine- 
 users or of superannuated clergymen. The 
 point is that from the peaks of Hollywood 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 205 
 
 fame one sees the horizon burst, and can view, 
 as in an Einstein straight line, even the Antip- 
 odes. If anywhere here the movies may 
 seem to be taken lightly, it is only from in- 
 competence to handle the epic quality which it 
 is so freely admitted they have. 
 
 Never before, perhaps, in the world has so 
 strange a social landscape existed as in Holly- 
 wood, never a scene so tempting to an am- 
 bitious philosopher. In a world where the 
 study of royalty in full bloom is becoming in- 
 creasingly difficult, one need not repine; the 
 picture people live on an eminence and in a 
 solitude which was unknown to royalty even 
 in its prime. Sovereigns of the old day had 
 power, but from the modern point of view 
 their publicity was not well managed. In- 
 deed, publicity in any real sense has never 
 existed until the movies made their favorites 
 known to the world. 
 
 Imagine yourself sojourning in, say, some 
 native village in central New Guinea, where 
 the inhabitants repair from their wattled or 
 otherwise exotically constructed huts in the 
 scantiest attire to the local picture-show; you 
 would find that they had not heard of Alex- 
 ander the Great or Julius Caesar; that they 
 knew nothing of Napoleon, George Washing- 
 ton, or Abraham Lincoln; that they con- 
 ceivably were unaware of Kaiser William, or 
 
2o6 American Towns and People 
 
 even of Mr. Woodrow Wilson; but that every 
 untutored savage of them — man, woman, or 
 child — knew the name and the look of the 
 well-beloved comic of the films. Of this 
 young gentleman, for example, it is now pos- 
 sible to say things that it was never before pos- 
 sible to say of any one. He is the best-known 
 person in the whole world, and he is better 
 known than any one has ever been in the 
 world's whole history. 
 
 Another great man is said to have a clause 
 in his contracts that his salary shall be auto- 
 matically raised so that it shall always be 
 larger than that of any actor in the world! 
 Such thoughts are vertiginous! 
 
 Not only are the movie artists the best 
 known; they are, it would appear, the most 
 necessary people in the world. The most 
 violent revolutionist does not conceive of any 
 rearrangement of the world, any dictatorship 
 by the proletariat, which will not leave the 
 movie favorites on their thrones. If such un- 
 precedented creatures present any resem- 
 blance at all to ordinary human beings, as in- 
 deed they do, it can only be explained by the 
 natural and ineradicable niceness of their na- 
 tures. 
 
 You cannot prevent modesty, like a shy 
 violet, from blossoming even under the Holly- 
 wood hedges. One adorable goddess cor- 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 207 
 
 reeled an admirer who was asserting that she 
 was the best-known person in the world. 
 
 "No," she said, prettily, ''I don't think I'm 
 more than the second, or even perhaps the 
 third, best-known person in the world." 
 
 True modesty, it must here be passionately 
 protested, has never consisted in ignoring all 
 the facts in the case. Why, in the interests of 
 an obviously false humility, blink at the truth? 
 This new royalty is indeed amazingly demo- 
 cratic. 
 
 The court surrounding a movie king or 
 queen is of course informal and untitled except 
 as the masseurs, the scenario-writers, the pri- 
 vate valets, maids, and secretaries, the special 
 interviewers for the movie papers, the trainers, 
 the Eastern authors temporarily in captivity, 
 the decorators of sets, the teachers of dancing 
 and rhythmic movements, the professors of 
 swimming and diving, the masters of the ken- 
 nels and the royal stables, the architects in 
 ordinary, the beauty and scalp specialists, and 
 so forth endlessly, may be considered as hav- 
 ing titles. In addition there is, of course, the 
 cloud of unexplained and devoted friends who 
 always gather around a throne and pour forth 
 acquiescence in every gem of thought that falls 
 from the royal lips — "yes-men" they are some- 
 times termed in the local vernacular. Into 
 this category also fall minor actors and ac- 
 
2o8 American Towns and People 
 
 tresses, and even extra people, all of whom are: 
 glad of any chance to learn how to behave: 
 when they, too, shall in time become royal — 
 a hope within the reach of all. 
 
 However veiled from the general public's; 
 eye, the life at court of a king is singularly 
 open to the courtiers. Queens have, of course, , 
 always delicately withdrawn into a certain 
 privacy. But for kings there is always the ex- 
 ample of Le Grand Monarque with his grands 
 et petits levers du roi, and Louis XIV pub- 
 licly putting on his breeches is no more amaz- 
 ing than one of the athletic stars, at the close 
 of the day's work, running, boxing, jumping, 
 and finally being massaged in presence of the 
 full court and to its soft, pleasant, adulatory 
 murmur. 
 
 All this, however, it must be repeated, 
 though not taking place exactly in privacy, 
 happens far from the great beating-hearted 
 public. Of course you could not have lived 
 in Versailles without seeing the Roi Soleil oc- 
 casionally flash by in his chariot, and in the 
 streets of the movie cities you catch glimpses 
 of the great as they break the speed limit in 
 their high-powered cars. Even so the inhabi- 
 tants of California are more blessed than those 
 of any other region of the world. Yet such 
 is the perversity of human nature that a small 
 boy was heard taunting another in the Holly- 
 
The High Kingdom, of the Movies 209 
 
 Wood streets with the fact that, although he 
 might have seen his favorite star often enough 
 in the street, he had never seen him on the 
 screen. Such incidents make you realize how- 
 special and curious is the distribution of the 
 good things in life. 
 
 Of course minor stars and the smaller fry 
 generally sometimes seem so thick as almost 
 to impede traffic. There are stories, too, 
 which are like those of Haroun-al-Raschid in 
 the romantic night of Bagdad, or some Roman 
 empress bent upon imperial but, so far as may 
 here be asserted, blameless adventure in the 
 Los Angeles of that earlier day. The really 
 great, however, the five or ten or tsventy 
 wearers of the purple, do live to some extent 
 behind a shimmering veil of mystery. It may 
 or may not be in their contracts that they shall 
 not dine at restaurants or repair thence to the 
 local theaters; at any rate, they rarely do. 
 Sometimes, indeed, they may grace a first 
 showing of one of their own films, and the ar- 
 rival and departure need only the traditional 
 crimson carpet to make them perfect. Ordi- 
 narily, however, movie stars see movies in the 
 studios at private views, of which one speaks 
 quite as if they were repetitions generates at 
 the Comedie Frangaise, or in private theaters 
 at their own palaces where a pleasing surve}'' 
 of the work of other artists may be occasion- 
 
210 American Towns and People 
 
 ally enjoyed, or unfavorably criticized, if in- 
 competent. 
 
 Of course, for most of us lesser folk the 
 smaller fry are easier to observe. And the 
 sight is both singular and agreeable — agree- 
 able partly because movie-land is, above 
 everything, the land of youth, where success 
 may come overwhelmingly before you are 
 twenty-one. (What terrible thing happens to 
 movie actresses of thirty one cannot imagine, 
 but then few have ever reached that extreme 
 old age.) The fact that the ideal movie ac- 
 tresses are small, dazzlingly blond, and per- 
 fectly formed (the type most admired, so it 
 was alleged, by the Prince of Wales), makes 
 them the most delicious little creatures to see. 
 The young men are gallant and handsome, 
 and neither sex shows any hesitancy about 
 making dress fanciful and gay. There is, too, 
 something very piquant about actors and ac- 
 tresses who go to work like other people in the 
 morning, though they return quite unlike the 
 tired business man at his hour. 
 
 All the things you have read about in the 
 newspapers do really happen in the Los 
 Angeles and Hollywood hotels. You may 
 come home to lunch and find that they have 
 been shooting a picture in the office and that 
 the company in full finery and paint are 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 21 1 
 
 lunching all around your own table. There 
 may be, for example, a bride in white satin 
 and orange blossoms, lovely ladies in evening 
 dress, distinguished old men — Heaven only 
 knows what they represent — covered with for- 
 eign orders, and once there was — oh, fair and 
 unforgettable memory! — a ravishing small ac- 
 tress, dressed, for some dark reason, as a jockey 
 in pale blue, tight-fitting doeskin breeches, a 
 canary-yellow waistcoat, and a smart blue 
 broadcloth jacket! The contrast to the re- 
 spectable families from the Middle West who 
 occupied the other tables near by was piquant, 
 and the experience, let us hope, for everybody 
 broadening. 
 
 This may seem to be taking the movies 
 lightly, but no one can breathe their atmos- 
 phere long and not be profoundly conscious 
 that some tremendous force is stirring here. 
 It is for our generation an almost incredible 
 experience to watch the beginnings and de- 
 velopment of a wholly new art. It is no use 
 for gentlemen with a Broadway past to assert, 
 with a pungent oath, that it is not an art, but 
 just the "show business." It is, or is going to 
 be, an art and a great one, and in Hollywood 
 they realize the fact with a kind of vague 
 terror. It is a little as if they had somehow 
 unloosed a great and beautiful beast and were 
 
212 American Towns and People 
 
 wondering whether, with their inexperiences, 
 their ineptitudes, and their vulgarities, they 
 could long hold and control him. 
 
 "We haven't more than scratched the sur- 
 face yet," they say in Hollywood. It is a cant 
 phrase, and they say it with a light, cynical ap- 
 preciation of the fact that it is used too much. 
 But they say it uneasily, too, as if some of 
 them, who have not become completely mega- 
 lomaniac, wonder whether, when the moving 
 picture has come to its full development, it 
 will still be they who ride the whirlwind and 
 direct the storm. 
 
 The newness of the movie in this golden 
 land of California is something fabulous. It 
 is only about five years ago that the pioneers, 
 lured by the promise of eternal sunshine, 
 trekked across the plains with their cameras 
 and a few adventurous actors who thought 
 there might perhaps be something in the pic- 
 tures, took barns and such makeshift quarters 
 as studios and began to find out something 
 about the movies. They are now the old 
 aristocratic movie families. Their ancient 
 palaces, built long before 1920, hang upon the 
 hills, and their wives are dripping ancestrally 
 with sables and pearls. 
 
 Before the stories are forgotten some one 
 should write the history of this bonanza 
 period. It was like '49 and the rush for Call- 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 213 
 
 fornia gold, or like Virginia City when for- 
 tunes in Nevada silver-mines were made over- 
 night. In January a man was driving a taxi- 
 cab, in June he was directing moving pictures. 
 In October actors from the East were borrow- 
 ing five dollars to pay for hall bedrooms, in 
 the spring they were insisting that their em- 
 ployers give them what are termed "open con- 
 tracts" in which the salary is delightfully left 
 to be filled in by the actor himself. Almost 
 without knowing it, the movie people had 
 stumbled upon unbelievable deposits of the 
 precious metal. It seemed to be there for any 
 one who chose to pick it up. Salaries became 
 princely. Actresses you had never heard of 
 were guaranteed twenty thousand a year, and 
 directors were counted failures if they fell be- 
 low a hundred thousand. And a frenzy of 
 spending seized upon every one. Automo- 
 biles, pipe-organs in the house, horses, dogs, 
 jewels, swimming-pools, and vintage cham- 
 pagne! If cigars were not lighted with hun- 
 dred-dollar bills it was only because in the 
 days of an earlier boom Coal Oil Johnny had 
 already done it. 
 
 And the extravagance attacked the business 
 end of the business. Economy became some- 
 thing almost ignoble, while wild spending was 
 thought to be not only a pleasure and a mental 
 stimulus to all concerned, but a means of 
 
214 American Towns and People 
 
 charming the public. The press was flooded 
 with wild stories, and the cloudburst of gold 
 over Hollywood was seen to break into fine 
 glittering spray of a thousand lovely forms. 
 It is impossible to spend more money on fake 
 "antiques" than was spent in Hollywood's 
 studios, to make uglier rooms as settings or to 
 admire them more. If one ambitious man- 
 ager reproduced Babylon, the next toyed with 
 Imperial Rome. And if the first hired a 
 thousand supernumerary slaves, his rival 
 bought at once ten times that number. It be- 
 came the fashion to engage your company at 
 full salary before you had in hand the scenario 
 of your play, and, even when you commenced 
 shooting, to pay salaries for long weeks to 
 some one you needed only for a brief scene at 
 the end. There are now in Hollywood Eng- 
 lish actors who are, as it were, permanently 
 and irreparably dazed by such procedure, not 
 being able to realize that it all makes up the 
 kind of confused, turbulent, passionate scene 
 which we in America love. 
 
 All this is indeed but the natural result of 
 a business becoming fabulously prosperous be- 
 fore any one has had time to learn how to run 
 it. If the movies are poor things, as they 
 sometimes are, it is because they are made by 
 poor people, as they sometimes are. Why 
 not? There are not enough good people to go 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 215 
 
 round. And the incompetent and vulgar 
 ones, safely intrenched, are not especially 
 anxious to evacuate in favor of some one 
 better. 
 
 What has just been set down is, admittedly, 
 lese-majeste, the only offense of that kind uni- 
 versally recognized in our country — Heaven 
 knows what fate awaits the writer of such 
 words. Even under the Espionage Act you 
 may speak ill of anything in America except 
 the movies — they are sacrosanct. Even when, 
 as in this present case, there is in the criticism 
 no wish to exterminate the pictures, only to 
 improve them. 
 
 And yet is it not rather in defense of them 
 that one repeats that both pictures and picture 
 people are still experimental? Fortunes 
 come and go. Reputations are made and lost 
 in a day. The land is noisy with the building 
 of new movie theaters; the populace, like 
 starved wolves, wait in lines that would girdle 
 the globe outside the doors. It must be again 
 insisted that all this is without precedent or 
 parallel. Never has any art or alleged art 
 been so known, so widely distributed, so popu- 
 lar. It is no wonder at all that when you are 
 close to the movies you can scarcely see any- 
 thing else in the world. The strongest head 
 swims at the possibilities of the future. 
 Propaganda, we nowadays believe, builds the 
 
2i6 American Towns and People 
 
 history of nations, and no one can yet guess to 
 what extent the movies, once turned to this ser- 
 vice, may mold the very destinies of mankind. 
 Why should the movie magnates stop at the 
 idea of absorbing the theater and the queer old 
 spoken drama? Why not add the magazines 
 and the book trade, for what indeed is written 
 literature but the raw material of scenarios? 
 Publicity might well demand the acquisition 
 of all newspapers. And when the mind and 
 the opinions of the world are well in hand, the 
 step to the assumption of all the functions of 
 organized government is not so great as to re- 
 quire a particularly high-vaulting ambition to 
 achieve it. To those who have not seriously 
 considered what moving pictures are, such 
 talk may seem wild and fantastic. But to a 
 movie magnate in Hollywood it should seem 
 almost sweetly reasonable. 
 
 If proof of this frame of mind be needed, 
 the attitude of the magnates toward any cen- 
 sorship of the pictures may be taken as evi- 
 dence. There was lately trouble with the 
 State of Pennsylvania, which is considered in 
 the East a rather powerful commonwealth. 
 But, from the talk that went on in Hollywood 
 picture circles about its outrageous interfer- 
 ence with certain favorite films, you might 
 have thought that Pennsylvania was about to 
 be ignominiously obliterated from the map. 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 217 
 
 and its territory, like that of a second Poland, 
 partitioned between the surrounding states 
 which had a more wholesome fear in their 
 hearts of meddling with the movies. Any one 
 who fears that the pictures might be going 
 too far in taking over the complete charge of 
 the world must remember that as a nation 
 gets the kind of a government it deserves, so, 
 too, it probably gets its due in its kind of 
 movies. 
 
 Since the movies came there has been more 
 "art" in the world than ever before — the most 
 impassioned detractors of the film will at least 
 admit that if the pictures have not all the 
 merits of the arts, they have at least most of 
 their faults. There is, in consequence, more 
 of the famous "artistic temperament" in exist- 
 ence than the world ever had to cope with 
 before. And here, with permission, a theory 
 will be propounded, that temperament, which 
 may well be considered in the figure of a rag- 
 ing lion, deprived of its natural excitements 
 in the immediate presence and applause of an 
 audience, is always in Hollywood hunting for 
 some other prey. 
 
 The whole question of how acting Is to be 
 achieved with a cold and unresponsive camera 
 taking the place of an infatuated public 
 might possibly be here discussed. Of course 
 there is always a certain public — the director, 
 
21 8 American Towns and People 
 
 the others of the company, and the few out- 
 siders who by hook or crook always manage to 
 be present — yet it is not an adequate audience. 
 And, besides, the conditions of picture-making 
 necessarily permit only a small bit of drama 
 to be done at a time. That is to say there is 
 no long passionate flow of the story, to warm 
 up temperament and sweep the artist emotion- 
 ally away. For example, suppose they are 
 shooting a great moral-uplift picture to be en- 
 titled "The Senses." A beautiful vampire is 
 ready in an evening gown of purple chififon. 
 Around her middle is bound a small tiger- 
 skin — to indicate that she is not a good woman. 
 In a minute she will be asked to lead astray 
 a fattish, middle-aged fellow who looks like 
 a prosperous broker, but not like a devastator 
 of female hearts. She has nothing to buoy 
 her up, to induce the necessary reprehensible 
 emotion, you may suppose. But when the 
 camera man is ready a small, rather dirty 
 violinist, fully equipped, steals stealthily for- 
 ward, and almost under the lovely creature's 
 nose draws forth from his instrument the low, 
 thrilling strains which immediately inspire 
 her to have her will of her victim. 
 
 Never before have the charms of music, to 
 thrill a savage breast, or to bring tears to the 
 largest, loveliest, forget-me-not blue eyes, been 
 so thoroughly recognized. The sister art is 
 
The reformer is an ever present afRiction. 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 219 
 
 constantly employed, sometimes even at the 
 cost of perfect harmony, as when, side by side 
 in the studio, a bit of Beethoven is being 
 played by a New England ex-school-mistress 
 on a melodeon to stimulate the actors in "Her 
 Fatal Sin" and a jazz tune super-jazzed by a 
 colored quartet so that the hero of a comic may 
 with greater comicality fall into a coal-hole. 
 It is now even said that one director "cutting" 
 a film feels that his temperament makes it es- 
 sential that he do so to the melody from a 
 string quartet. 
 
 Has any hint been given of why the king- 
 dom of the movies is at once so excited and 
 so exciting, why personal behavior is so often 
 wayward and untrammeled, and why Holly- 
 wood at moments has all the more agreeable 
 characteristics of a mad-house? 
 
 The assuagement of temperament is not al- 
 ways accomplished by music, nor, indeed, cer- 
 tain fond delusions of the romantic to the con- 
 trary, by vice. Breaking contracts always 
 helps, and an occasional divorce from time to 
 time keeps one from stagnating. But there 
 are simpler ways, really more original. The 
 famous star who leaves a standing order with 
 one of his secretaries that at five every after- 
 noon all engagements for that evening shall 
 be, as it were, automatically broken, whether 
 he was to figure in them as host or guest, and 
 
220 American Towns and People 
 
 something fresh and promising be taken on at 
 six, is only availing himself of his position to 
 gain a sense of liberty and piquant novelty for 
 each night's pleasure which we should all of 
 us like were we as fortunately situated. 
 
 Everything is grist that comes to the mill of 
 temperament, if it is no more than having all 
 your meals up-stairs on a tray or wearing 
 sables in August. One does one's best, if it is 
 only the little actress who lets her fellow- 
 guests see that her gentlemen friends always 
 call her at least fifteen times to the telephone 
 during dinner in the hotel dining-room — a 
 matter accomplished by arrangement with a 
 bell-boy if anything goes wrong. There is 
 one great man who would not consider cross- 
 ing the continent without his private band 
 which plays after dinner in one of his private 
 cars; he is for the moment quenching the fire 
 within his breast. Chacun a son gout. An- 
 other, a famous comedian, prefers to every- 
 thing the liquid eloquence of his favorite "yes- 
 men" telling him antiphonally how great he'd 
 be in "Hamlet," if only the damn play were 
 screenable; and legend, so often apocryphal, 
 even says that an agreeable and accomplished 
 monkey who inhabits Hollywood and may 
 generally be seen whenever a scenario contains 
 a good simian part, is himself not averse to the 
 pleasures of being interviewed by some hum- 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 221 
 
 ble and worshiping writer for a moving-pic- 
 ture paper. 
 
 The need to satisfy temperament is not con- 
 fined merely to actors and actresses. There 
 are also to be assuaged the great proprietors 
 and the great directors who now rival the 
 prima-donnas and the tenors of an earlier day. 
 Is there, we may well ask, any good reason 
 why, when a magnate owner has a big ex- 
 hibitor's contract to sign, involving millions, 
 he should not be temperamental over it? If 
 he should motor by night into the solitude of 
 the great hills, and there, alone with Nature, 
 comparing her grandeur unfavorably with his 
 own, possess his soul and fix his percentages — 
 why not he as well as another? 
 
 It is partly by the development of tempera- 
 ment that directors have forged ahead so 
 amazingly in the movie world. When the 
 pictures started it was known that a certain 
 number of actors and actresses were available; 
 nothing was known about directors. Strate- 
 gically they were excessively well placed, and 
 they took excellent advantage of their position. 
 
 They have a very amusing photographic 
 trick in the pictures. They build, for ex- 
 ample, a town, which is to be carried away by 
 a flood or destroyed by an earthquake, in 
 miniature, with the hills a few feet and the 
 houses a few inches high. The camera will 
 
222 American Towns and People 
 
 make you believe it is life-size. A director, 
 directing such operations as these, seems to be 
 seen in his right stature, astride the world! 
 
 It has been interesting to see how the 
 ^'featuring" of directors has kept pace and 
 almost outdistanced that of stars. There is 
 indeed much reason for this, and justice. 
 Theirs is a curiously difficult and complicated 
 metier, requiring tact, technical skill, adminis- 
 trative ability, and some touch of the creative 
 imagination. And yet it is amazing that even 
 a director should become so great that the ad- 
 vertisements dare declare that a picture of his 
 is 
 
 Greater than Words 
 
 Finer than Thoughts 
 
 Deeper than Life 
 even though it be, as it probably is, wholly un- 
 like all three. Such phrases do, however, give 
 an idea of the dizzy heights to which directors 
 have now climbed. Here, at the top of the 
 world, they would do well to consider not 
 merely their exalted position, but its responsi-. 
 bilities. It is true that they, more than any 
 one else, can make the movie the fine and 
 beautiful thing it might become. 
 
 The director in the flesh — often a robustly 
 abundant amount of it — is a magnificent sight. 
 His silk shirt opens upon an often fine throat. 
 His shapely legs are incased in shining Cordo- 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 223 
 
 van leather gaiters — Heaven knows why. He 
 moves as a creature of another race. If ex- 
 clusion from the local golf club has seared his 
 soul, outwardly it has only seemed to increase 
 his pride. Fortunate are those, for example, 
 who have seen him at a shipwreck scene where 
 he courageously orders scores of wretched 
 actors and actresses to risk exhaustion, pneu- 
 monia, and death by plunging into a boiling 
 sea.^ Thrice blessed those who are invited for 
 great moments — when in the studio, for ex- 
 ample, Cleopatra is to entertain Mark Antony, 
 or the Queen of Sheba is to visit Solomon — 
 and are permitted to view the glittering be- 
 jeweled cohorts marshaled, and to see scores of 
 women, each more beautiful than the morn, 
 tremble at their master's slightest word. At 
 such moments the director is at his best, a 
 beautiful yet sinister Byronic figure. Upon 
 his scaffolding throne he sits like Xerxes by 
 that Eastern sea, or perhaps, with his dark, 
 passionate pride, like Lucifer upon one of the 
 peaks of hell. He is indeed to-day the pro-, 
 tagonist of the movie drama. 
 
 Of course there are authors — one is always 
 in danger of forgetting them. They are a 
 comparatively unimportant race, since in the 
 movies even the best paid of them scarcely 
 earn more than a hundred or a hundred and 
 fifty thousand dollars a year. Scenario-writ- 
 
224 American Towns and People 
 
 ing is in its infancy, and tliere is no reason to' 
 suppose that in due time the most admirable 
 scenario-wrights will not be developed — in- 
 deed, they are developing now, doing their 
 work direct, as it were, for the screen, invent- 
 ing their own stories and their characters and 
 putting down their own point of view upon 
 the world. The best will doubtless be those 
 reared, as it were, in the studios, to whom the 
 medium seems neither new nor strange. 
 These young people will probably do better 
 things than either superannuated hacks from 
 that queer old speaking stage, or indeed more 
 robust young Broadway playwrights, who are 
 merely lusting for the profits of the films. 
 All are in danger of discouragement; they 
 have moments when the whole business of 
 providing material for the pictures is con- 
 temptuously spoken of as the "canning-fac- 
 tory." And indeed there are moments when 
 ineptitude, banality, and vulgarity seem to be 
 becoming standardized. But the uneasy sense 
 which pervades Hollywood that the public is 
 constantly demanding not only more but better 
 pictures, should be proof that there is sure to 
 be a field some day soon for every one's best 
 and brightest creations. 
 
 The term authors is sometimes used to de- 
 scribe those who, instead of writing scenarios, 
 turn out magazine stories, books, or plays for 
 
The High Kingdom of the Movies 225 
 
 the speaking stage. And until very recently 
 the chief object of movie activities was to pre- 
 vent the interference of these "nuts" in the 
 Hollywood change of their work into some- 
 thing rich and strange for the pictures. It 
 may be suspected that the old guard of the 
 film world will fight hard before it will ad- 
 mit these barbarians, who know nothing of 
 "continuity" and such mysteries, into the rich 
 inclosure to loot and pillage. Yet it is a symp- 
 tom of the uneasiness of these veterans of three 
 or four years' service that you begin to hear 
 talk even among them about getting the author 
 more "into the business." 
 
 A slight beginning has of course been made. 
 Authors have been brought in, confined at the 
 studios in pleasant, sunlit cells, with chintz- 
 covered chairs, and pet canary-birds or gold- 
 fish, as best pleased them, and there expected 
 to work. It is not quite certain how much 
 they have worked — there were also chintz- 
 covered sofas. At any rate, there is no real 
 proof that they were actually taken behind the 
 veil and permitted to know the mysteries. 
 But something is stirring in the deep bosom of 
 our greatest art; somewhere in that dim future 
 one sees that our greatest authors may be those 
 who have rid themselves of both the spoken 
 and written word. 
 
 Who, however, cares for theories who has 
 
226 American Towns and People 
 
 journeyed to the high kingdom of the movies 
 and seen that gay, rich, wild, struggling, and 
 striving world? It is a privilege to have seen 
 the human side of royalty; to have learned that 
 they, though triumphant, still dream of 
 higher efforts, better pictures. And, though 
 both cats and authors may look at queens and 
 kings and afterward talk a little banteringly 
 about it all, both must be deeply sensible that 
 to have been received at court is at once a 
 pleasure and an honor. Good luck to Holly- 
 wood. It is indeed the capital of the world. 
 
The American Child 
 
 IN a recent ingenious and original volume 
 on some eminent figures of the Victorian 
 period the author at the very outset says that 
 the difficulty in writing the history of that time 
 is that we know too much about it. 
 
 "Ignorance," he goes on gravely to assure 
 us, "is the first requisite of the historian — 
 ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, 
 which selects and omits with a placid perfec- 
 tion unattainable by the highest art." 
 
 These phrases are hastily borrowed to set 
 at the head of this article, not so much because 
 they shine more brightly than other epigrams 
 with which the modern literary firmament is 
 studded as because they seem to give courage 
 to a celibate author about to put a rash pen 
 to paper for a description of the American 
 child. 
 
 The bachelor, unless employed in a medical 
 capacity, knows almost nothing of the birth or 
 extreme infancy of the personage in question. 
 And even of that time when the child begins 
 to prattle, and wit and wisdom cascade from 
 its lips like pearls, the non-father is only an 
 
 227 
 
228 American Towns and People 
 
 ill-accredited historian, unless, as Mr. Lytton 
 Strachey says, ignorance be an equipment. It 
 is singular how easy it is to forget stories about 
 other people's children. In these pages can 
 be promised none of those anecdotes of little 
 Herbert or Eva which enrapture the parent 
 and indeed lead him into an emotional morass 
 from which he can never clearly see the whole 
 race of children, the majority of which are in- 
 evitably not his own. 
 
 Here indeed has been made, almost before 
 it was intended, the plea of the writer's com- 
 petence. Child-study — a majestic term — is 
 nowadays a leading, perhaps the leading 
 branch of American learning, and in investi- 
 gating a great subject many workers are desir- 
 able. Close observation, such as a parent can 
 give, of the individual specimen is indispens- 
 able. But a more disengaged eye will per- 
 haps better trace, through the nation's history, 
 the rise of children to their present eminent 
 position, and judge the processes by which 
 they grasped power. The disinterested celi- 
 bate may also possibly best judge the tend- 
 encies in the opposite direction, toward the 
 resubjugation of the race of children, the ways 
 in which they themselves are made victims 
 of this new wide-spread science of child-cul- 
 ture. The American child is not merely a 
 small individual, straight or curly haired, and 
 
The American Child 229 
 
 agreeable or disagreeable as the case may be. 
 He is a great and epic figure. On his small, 
 unconscious shoulders he bears the nation's 
 future; and as a cat may look at a queen so 
 long as those anomalous figures decorate the 
 world, so may a man who presumably knows 
 little enough about children still observe them, 
 discreetly and from a respectful distance, and 
 believe that his contribution to the knowledge 
 of them has its small value. 
 
 It might, too, be urged that a bachelor, even 
 in the forties, may conceivably like children. 
 But doting parents find it so difficult to believe 
 in even this restrained and temperate affection 
 that the point will not be unduly pressed. 
 
 In the early days of the Republic the child, 
 though produced freely, had no great vogue, 
 if one may put it that way. Children were 
 an almost invariable accompaniment of mar- 
 riage, and that they were generally liked there 
 can be no reasonable doubt. But no one made 
 any great fuss about them. They were some- 
 times, to quote the language of the period, 
 limbs of Satan, and this, though it distressed, 
 puzzled no one. The doctrine of original sin 
 still prevailed, and affectionate parents re- 
 signed themselves to beating the Evil One out 
 of their offspring. "Spare the rod and spoil 
 the child" was a maxim on the tenderest pa- 
 rental lips. Religion held out some hope of 
 
230 American Towns and People 
 
 retrieving these poor, small lost ones. The 
 early volumes of the admirable Poole's Index 
 to Periodical Literature had an astonishing 
 number of entries under the title "Conversion 
 of Children." There were, of course, the in- 
 credible Sunday-school stories with painful 
 heroes and heroines, convinced at a tender age 
 of sin, but, on the whole, children appeared 
 very little in literature. Not much was writ- 
 ten for them and comparatively little about 
 them. In their social aspect they were, by the 
 grace of God and the discipline of their elders, 
 seen but not heard. A grim picture, every 
 one must admit. And, though under this 
 regime many an unpromising child turned 
 into an admirable grown-up — yet as certainly 
 many a little one of rare gifts and promise was 
 crushed into hopelessness by its harshness. 
 
 The pendulum has swung as far the other 
 way now. There was, of course, an inter- 
 mediate period. Little Eva in Mrs. Stowe's 
 pages is of course a Sunday-school survival, 
 but she was followed by Pecli's Bad Boy and 
 then those immortals, Tom Sawyer and Huck 
 Finn. Even Henry James, who at first blush 
 seems out of place in this galere, made Daisy 
 Miller's naughty little brother famous. And 
 a tale called Helen's Babies was, as late as the 
 early 'seventies of the last century, one of the 
 first phenomenal best-selling successes. It 
 
The American Child 231 
 
 was the bad child's moment, the era of the 
 etifant terrible. Scenting no danger and 
 pleased with its new spirit of tolerance and 
 humanity, the American public warmed this 
 monster in its bosom. The child, which had 
 been an inferior, almost inhuman creature, 
 was now welcomed as an equal and a brother. 
 No one saw in how few years it might become* 
 a superior and a master. 
 
 Henry James, always oversensitized as to 
 the American child, felt early something omi- 
 nous about it. In some story of a European- 
 ized American returning home the hero hears 
 in a hotel, and notes with fear, ^'the high, firm 
 note of a child." And there is another hotel 
 passage of equal significance which is worth 
 transcribing: 
 
 Then there are long corridors defended by 
 gusts of hot air. Down the middle swoops a 
 pale little girl on roller-skates. "Get out of 
 my way!" she shrieks as she passes. She has 
 ribbons on her hair and frills on her dress. 
 She makes the tour of the vast hotel. 
 
 Is one mistaken in detecting here the crea- 
 tion of a Frankenstein? 
 
 There are many possible reasons for the rise 
 in the value of children. It is always con- 
 ceivable that it may be explained on purely 
 
232 American Towns and People 
 
 economic grounds. As families grow smaller, 
 children, now more rarely produced, come to 
 have a scarcity price put on them in the mar- 
 ketplace of sentiment. We now vie with one 
 another in finding expression for their worth. 
 A poet and essayist who is even more widely 
 read here than in her native England drove 
 the point home when she asserted that, rather 
 than that one child should ever die of hydro- 
 phobia, she would exterminate all the millions 
 of dogs, pet an.d otherwise, of the world! Is 
 it to be wondered that it became increasingly 
 difficult to discipline a race so well thought 
 of? 
 
 An English visitor in the middle 'eighties 
 notes with grave consternation the difficulty 
 American parents have in keeping children 
 from swearing and from calling their parents 
 by their given names. It would be hard to 
 say to-day just how general swearing has be- 
 come among our best children, but in any case 
 we may be sure that if they swear it is con- 
 sidered part of their charm as it is of parrots. 
 As for calling father ''Arthur" or "Woopsy," 
 that goes without saying. And old gentlemen 
 who in the early nineteenth century would 
 have belched fire had they been addressed as 
 anything but ''Sir" will now fawn upon chil- 
 dren, pleading with them to be called 
 "Cousin Howard" or "Scootums." Anything 
 
The American Child 233 
 
 as formal as the old modes of address seems 
 rigid and chilling, and likely to lose to their 
 elders that approbation by children which is 
 now so essential to any self-respect. 
 
 The advance of the child was gradual and 
 insidious. As no one realized the momentous 
 nature of the change, no one noted it. Of 
 course there were outward signs which should 
 have warned. Children's dress, for example, 
 which had been extremely ugly, became pretty 
 and picturesque. The Kate Greenaway books 
 which came with the "art revival" of the 
 'eighties, made children's clothes delightful 
 and children themselves adorable. The efifete 
 continent of Europe began to send its styles. 
 Small dashing sailors began to appear, and 
 ravishing little girls with short socks and bare 
 knees. It was the beginning of the end. 
 
 Books about children for children, and, 
 more dangerous, about children for grown- 
 ups, began to appear. Perhaps it was Little 
 Lord Fauntleroy who started it. But there 
 was, too, that enchanting volume. The Golden 
 Age, The stage played its part, too. Child 
 actresses and actors became an important 
 feature of theatrical life; their bleating voices 
 may still occasionally be detected, though they 
 have grown and now assume maturer roles. 
 Societies for the protection of children inter- 
 vened. But the public would not be balked. 
 
234 American Towns and People 
 
 Dwarfs were discovered who assumed Infan- 
 tile roles; closely shaven (twice on matinee 
 days) they even assumed the parts of the un- 
 born children in The Blue Bird. Once you 
 begin to see that a little child may lead you, 
 you are its hopeless and infatuated slave. 
 You are, as to the young of the race, on the 
 way to being a confirmed Barrieite or a 
 Maeterlinckian. 
 
 Barrie has made us see childhood anew. 
 In the country where his children play the 
 same dew sparkles that lay like diamonds on 
 the grass at the world's dawn. There is no 
 witchery like his, no such tenderness, no such 
 foolish, lovely jokes. We break our hearts 
 for some lost, half-forgotten Arcadia. We 
 hear the bells that ring in some happy city 
 where all saints and angels and little children 
 that have died now are. And this poor world, 
 as we listen to him, would be, so it seems, like 
 Paradise itself, half laughter and half tears, 
 if we could only rightly value its youngest and 
 fairest inhabitants. 
 
 Maeterlinck, speaking another language for 
 another civilization, does not, perhaps, ever 
 come so intimately near to us. But he would 
 lead us even closer to the mysteries. In his 
 dim regions, lit by lovely unearthly lights, 
 little children, all blond and shimmering, wait 
 to be born. And he would have us vaguely 
 
The American Child 235 
 
 apprehend the process by which each small 
 wandering soul seeks out the mother who shall 
 in divine tenderness love it. 
 
 If these two writers only are mentioned of a 
 whole school, it is because they are the high 
 priests. There is indeed something of the 
 quality of a new religion in the modern exalta- 
 tion of the child. Once, when men felt the 
 need of something gentler and more merciful, 
 there grew up in the Church the cult of the 
 Mother of God. To-day, does not the child, 
 sitting on his mother's knee, smile more en- 
 gagingly, and seem to hint persuasively that in 
 his innocence is the salvation of the world? 
 
 Sympathy and liking are duly and sincerely 
 recorded here for anything that can make the 
 world more sensible of the fragile, evanescent 
 beauty of childhood. Yet we have a right to 
 examine even new religions and see how their 
 tenets are to affect our daily lives. If chil- 
 dren are human at all it may be dangerous to 
 burn so much incense before them, dangerous 
 alike to them and to those who swing the 
 censers. 
 
 Children were once thought well of chiefly 
 because they would grow up to be men and 
 women; nowadays men and women are valued 
 mostly because they were once children. 
 Growing up is only falling from a once proud 
 estate. Children come to us trailing clouds 
 
236 American Towns and People 
 
 of glory, and gifted, too — this is the curious 
 point — with some antique instinctive wisdom 
 more cosmic than ours, more directly drawn 
 from the hidden divine fountains of the uni- 
 verse. To adepts of the new cult a child at 
 the breakfast-table consuming its cereal nour- 
 ishment sits oracularly like the Delphic 
 priestess. A gentleman prominent in national 
 affairs took this view of his blameless little 
 yellow-haired daughter and gravely put to her 
 the problems which were distracting the 
 world. 
 
 *'I believe so and so,'' he would sometimes 
 say, ''but Gracie and the chief justice of the 
 Supreme Court think I'm wron^." 
 
 That he often was wrong does not, some- 
 how, to one heretical as to childhood's su- 
 preme wisdom, prove that Gracie was as often 
 right. Of course the father's moderation in 
 allowing Gracie's inspired words to prove the 
 chief justice rather than himself right must be 
 praised; it is more often the other way round. 
 A street preacher on a soap-box once shouted: 
 
 "I say, and God agrees with me — " 
 
 Some of the more rapturous child-wor- 
 shipers seem a little like this. They say, and 
 children agree with them; the coincidence be- 
 ing as sure proof of children's wisdom as to 
 the soap-box exhorter it was of God's. 
 
 Under the influence of such sentiments edu- 
 
The American Child 237 
 
 cation has of course been transformed. No 
 one can doubt the harshness and too often the 
 stupidity of the old school system, and no one 
 can help wishing that the acquisition of 
 knowledge might be a pleasure rather than a 
 torment. And yet the object of education is 
 presumably still to educate, its power to amuse 
 being supplementary wholly, and we must 
 deal with the fact that children in our schools 
 do not nowadays much care to work. If 
 things do not suit them, they strike — even New 
 York has already seen this. From Bolshevik 
 Russia comes almost ideal news to children. 
 The scholars there establish the curriculum 
 and dismiss at their pleasure unpopular 
 teachers! They see to their own comfort, too, 
 not only by lengthening the recess-time, but by 
 establishing well-equipped smoking-rooms for 
 the upper classes! Of course this last pro- 
 vision may not seem much to the children of 
 New York and New Jersey, who, according to 
 recent astonishing revelations, are accustomed 
 to securing their supply of cocaine fresh each 
 day from enterprising merchants who are at 
 hand just outside the school gates at the clos- 
 ing-hour. But this is only a measure of what 
 improvements we may expect when American 
 children take the schools in hand. 
 
 Even teachers sometimes, in moments of dis- 
 couragement, admit that children don't work 
 
238 American Towns and People 
 
 as hard as they used to and don't learn as 
 much. Is it possible to trace a connection be- 
 tween these two facts? Is work really neces- 
 sary? Will children, even under the most 
 modern system, ever learn the multiplication 
 table in sheer ecstasy of joy? Foreign chil- 
 dren seem to know more than their American 
 confreres; just as grown-up foreigners so 
 often seem better educated than we ourselves 
 are. Is the difficulty that we still make 
 lessons a little irksome, and do not trust 
 enough to that innate excellence of the child, 
 which would doubtless, when the time came, 
 give him knowledge as if by miracle? 
 
 There is a singularly pleasant legend 
 (which should be a great favorite with child- 
 worshipers) concerning the offspring of a dis- 
 tinguished American authority on painting. 
 These children, so it is alleged, passed their 
 early years wholly art-free, unmolested by any 
 knowledge of paintings and their value. 
 Their ignorance was abysmal, considering 
 whose children they were. Yet their bodies 
 were healthy and their minds virgin soil, and 
 their parents confident that when the time 
 came — 
 
 The time at last did come. When they 
 were fourteen and twelve, respectively, the 
 little boy and girl were, in accordance with 
 their parents' theories, solemnly taken to the 
 
The American Child 239 
 
 Uffizi Gallery in Florence. There they were 
 placed successively in front of the master- 
 pieces of the painter's art while gently and 
 lucidly, in simple words, it was explained to 
 them why these were great and noble pictures. 
 Their little minds, unsullied by art-knowl- 
 edge, free from the squint which the sight of 
 bad painting gives, were able to understand 
 at once, to swallow art at a gulp. They re- 
 turned home, where a hot bath, a wholesome 
 supper, and a night's sound rest invigorated 
 them and prepared them for the morrow's test. 
 
 At about eleven in the morning they were 
 taken to the Pitti Gallery and, as it were, 
 loosed. And then — oh, lovely miracle! — like 
 homing doves they flew unerringly to the 
 masterpieces there housed, and proclaimed 
 their merit in choice English such as their own 
 father might have used! This is the kind of 
 a story every one would like to believe. It 
 seems to take some practical advantage of the 
 child's intrinsic superiority to the man, and to 
 dispense with all annoying and expensive 
 study. 
 
 Unfortunately for the comfort of children, 
 few parents have the perfect faith of these just 
 noted. The education of children, though 
 transformed, still goes on at terrific tension. 
 But the work now seems to be piled on the 
 mothers rather than on the children. The 
 
240 American Towns and People 
 
 most feeble-minded mother who is capable of 
 bearing a child must now be thoroughly 
 familiar with all its reflexes, complexes, and 
 inhibitions. While she is washing the dishes 
 she must prop up the latest volume on pre- 
 natal influences against the pan. She must 
 swim out upon a vasty ocean of science and 
 theory. She must search her soul to know 
 whether breakfast contained a safe blending of 
 proteins and vitamines, and she must be sure 
 that the union suit of underwear she has 
 chosen for her darling puts no strain upon the 
 dorsal muscles. With Freud in hand she must 
 read her child's dreams as did priests of old 
 the entrails of the sacrifices, trying to discover 
 whether the pain in the little one's heel is there 
 because his great-grandmother, in girlhood, 
 dreamed of Achilles. 
 
 Such labors and such devotion immediately 
 suggest that motherhood has now perhaps be- 
 come a greater thing than childhood. May it 
 be, after all, that the child's chief value in our 
 American life is that it brings into being the 
 American mother? When you see in Wash- 
 ington the fine building which serves as Head- 
 quarters of the National Congress of Mothers, 
 you realize how serious a matter it is to go into 
 the profession of child-bearing. 
 
 There is perhaps a good deal of mock 
 heroics in all this talk of the mother sacro- 
 
The American Child 241 
 
 sanct — peasant women accustomed to plow a 
 field the day after a child is born might well 
 think it a confession of the frailness and 
 cowardice of the modern city-dwelling fe- 
 male. Yet it is well to read over occasionally 
 the pages in which Theodore Roosevelt, never 
 a puling sentimentalist, ennobles and dignifies 
 motherhood. And no one can seriously 
 quarrel with any Better Babies campaign. 
 (The law and practice as to child labor in 
 some parts of the country are crying for the 
 attention of the merciful mothers of Amer- 
 ica.) Even Malthus, a much-maligned phi- 
 losopher, did not preach race suicide — only 
 fewer, and so better, children. Indeed, to 
 hand a better world on to a better generation 
 is succinctly the great and holy duty of man- 
 kind, and the most bemuddled mother over 
 her scientific volumes, however comic she may 
 be, is never quite a figure of fun. 
 
 Nevertheless, it may be permissible to sound 
 a warning. Scientific knowledge on the 
 mother's part must not be allowed to rub the 
 remaining bloom from childhood. The cab- 
 bage, even when it begins its career under a 
 bell glass, and has its roots warmed with hot- 
 water pipes within the soil, probably does not 
 much mind being kept from sounding its 
 native field-note wild. The incubator babies, 
 too, at Coney Island or the county fair, do not 
 
242 American Towns and People 
 
 concern themselves as yet with the romance 
 and poetry of their rearing. (What a char- 
 acter the incubator baby, free from all senti- 
 mental memories of parents, makes for Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw!) But most other modern 
 children, though they be potentates, find life 
 by no means all near-beer and skittles. They 
 are pestered at every step by new theories 
 learned in the child-study course for mothers. 
 Once upon a time there was a very beautiful 
 little girl with golden locks who lived like a 
 princess with her very modern and scientific 
 father and mother in a large house upon a 
 little hill where many wild strawberries grew. 
 A well-meaning but unscientific grown-up 
 guest (a wretched bachelor, of course) sug- 
 gested one day, when he happened to be break- 
 fasting alone with the little girl, w^hom he 
 very much liked, that she and he should spend 
 the morning blissfully gathering the sweet- 
 perfumed little berries which they would eat 
 at lunch with the thick cream which came 
 from the nice cow in the barn. The lovely 
 little girl said, "No, thank you," but her lip 
 trembled. Then the foolish old bachelor 
 again explained and urged his delightful plan, 
 upon which the lovely little girl burst into 
 tears and rushed from the table. The scien- 
 tific mother a little later explained that by the 
 doctor's orders the lovely little girl had never 
 
The American Child 243 
 
 in all her life been allowed to eat any un- 
 cooked fruit! 
 
 Now the doctor may have been right; in- 
 deed, an amendment to the Constitution of the 
 United States prohibiting the eating of raw 
 fruit by minors may be urgently necessary. 
 But we must learn somehow legitimately to in- 
 clude picking wild berries in the activities of 
 childhood. It is humbly suggested that per- 
 haps if the stewing of the fruit might have 
 occurred on a brick stove which the child had 
 helped build, over leaves and twigs she her- 
 self had gathered, something of the old 
 glamour of wild-strawberry adventure might 
 have clung to it still, as the grown-up had re- 
 membered it from his own boyhood. 
 
 Especially in reference to rural pleasures it 
 is to be hoped that the children of to-day may, 
 when they are older, have some of the ro- 
 mantic memories that their elders now have. 
 Perhaps it is only a trick of advancing age, 
 but the swimming-hole in the brook seems to 
 have a quality which no bathing establishment 
 with a pool and pergola and hot and cold 
 showers can ever have. During last autumn's 
 war thrills one of the great metropolitan news- 
 papers for days filled columns with letters 
 from elderly contributors who debated about 
 the corn-silk cigarettes of their youth, or those 
 they made of the dried leaves of the wild 
 
244 American Towns and People 
 
 grape. It seems somehow as if the modern 
 child's country were too well equipped. 
 
 Of course in the country nature study pur- 
 sues the child. A parent or other instructor 
 at his elbow forces him to learn how to tell 
 the wild-flower from the birds — the phrase is 
 by now traditional. And one suspects that, al- 
 though they provide delightful Indian and 
 cowboy suits, they even want him to learn 
 from some handbook how to play the Sioux 
 brave and from some recommended diagrams 
 how to build a robber's cave. But childhood 
 and the country are an almost invincible com- 
 bination; it would be hard to ruin them. 
 
 It is very pleasant to think of all the summer 
 camps throughout the land where boys, and 
 girls, too, both rich and poor, may learn some- 
 thing of woodcraft and simple living and 
 open-air sleeping. Nothing can be more 
 agreeable than to see a company of Boy Scouts 
 starting ofif for a week-end hike to the country, 
 where they will camp, and catch and fry their 
 own fish, and perhaps lie on beds of pine 
 needles. On the whole, perhaps the modern 
 way is just as good. And many parts of the 
 country have a moving-picture theater fairly 
 accessible and a soda-water fountain at hand, 
 so that the most exacting child who is not con- 
 tent with the simple pleasures of field and 
 stream may not lack its evening amusement. 
 
The American Child 245 
 
 There is, however, quite seriously, the 
 definite danger that all this psychic mode of 
 educating may kill every little eccentricity, 
 every little imaginative quality in a child 
 w^hich may be different from the standardized 
 imagination for children as found in Barrie 
 and Maeterlinck and recommended in the 
 mothers' handbooks, and so in the end produce 
 a monotony of personalities. It cannot be too 
 pleasant for a child to be too closely studied, 
 especially when it comes into the odd, de- 
 licious, happy, sad days of adolescence — it is 
 not pleasant, when a fellow is embarked upon 
 his first love-affair, to find mother at hand 
 with Chapter XIII of her favorite volume on 
 child-psychology, demanding the most awk- 
 ward and embarrassing confidences, and study- 
 ing her son as Fabre might an amorous insect 
 under the microscope. In the old days chil- 
 dren were sometimes very unhappy because no 
 one was trying to understand them; they must 
 nowadays be sometimes unhappy because 
 every one is trying to. Privacy, both of per- 
 son and of thoughts, may be as much their 
 right as ours. We must be careful how we 
 fumble with their souls. 
 
 Apprehensive grown-ups must, of course, 
 remember that some of the simplicity and ro- 
 mance of their childhood has necessarily gone 
 forever. No danger can now threaten a child 
 
246 American Towns and People 
 
 equal to that of the old high bicycle. No 
 little boy to-day can make it the goal of his am- 
 bition to drive the horse-car down the tracks 
 in Main Street; there will soon be children 
 who have never seen a horse. These same 
 nervous people may also safely count on the 
 resistance, conscious and unconscious, of the 
 American child itself. It is amazing how 
 racy of the soil that person is. He reverts to 
 type as do the lower animals or garden flowers. 
 Train him with foreign masters or governesses 
 as you like, he has moments when he snaps 
 back. His speech is an example. He may 
 for a few of the tenderer years, if he is care- 
 fully isolated, be master of the low, well- 
 modulated tones of England. But the mo- 
 ment he goes to school his speech gains at once 
 the tang of the streets, or of the gutter if you 
 wish to be emphatic. His nasal tones cut the 
 circumambient air and his R's rasp. It is 
 something stronger than himself, some germ 
 that floats everywhere. Later, at college or 
 after, he may discipline his tongue into the 
 best manner of our own pleasant x\merican 
 language. But he must have sown his lin- 
 guistic wild oats on the Bowery. 
 
 The American child resists manners, too, 
 and sometimes even growing up does not alter 
 this frame of mind. Here in America little 
 boys shake hands and little girls courtesy verjr 
 
The American Child 247 
 
 much in the way of animals trained by fear. 
 And no American child will, of its own voli- 
 tion, ever say, "Good morning," or, "How 
 d'ye do?" to any grown-up. Foreign chil- 
 dren seem by comparison unnatural little mon- 
 sters of courtesy. And the Latin languages, 
 elegant and concise, give children speaking 
 them an exaggerated appearance of poise and 
 polish. There was an undue amount of 
 clamor and shouting in a uniformed line of 
 Venetian school-boys on their way to church, 
 and a child of perhaps ten spoke up. 
 
 ''La calma, signoriT he urged, with mock 
 seriousness. "Calmness, gentlemen!" 
 
 An acid little girl of six, on the tramcar 
 at Rome with her nurse, passed by a building 
 where huge posters advertised an exhibition 
 of modern painting. 
 
 "That wouldn't interest me," remarked 
 nurse. 
 
 "It interests others," answered the little girl, 
 coldly. 
 
 Perhaps we may be glad that our children 
 are more natural. There is a kind of wild- 
 ness still in the American soil. And children, 
 who are born conservatives, have a deep- 
 seated love for what is indigenous. They are 
 the custodians of the American note. A lit- 
 tle ten-year-old boy at our most fashionable 
 seaside resort comes to mind. He was one 
 
248 American Towns and People 
 
 of those millionaire babies, fabled in the Sun- 
 day supplements, reared in luxury, domiciled 
 in palaces. And when the Fourth of July 
 came there was a terrific scene (from which 
 he emerged victorious) because the one thing 
 he insisted on doing was to sell a pale, watery 
 lemonade for a cent a glass from a small stand 
 which he was going to erect outside the great 
 gates of his father's place on Bellevue Ave- 
 nue! Within him deep called to deep; by 
 instinct he knew that he could not rightly 
 grow up as an American unless he had at 
 least once performed all the traditional rights 
 of American boyhood, as poor boys and coun- 
 try boys and slum boys were everywhere per- 
 forming them. 
 
 Has the statement been too long delayed 
 that American children are the finest in the 
 world? They are not to be held responsible 
 for the theories and follies of their elders. 
 They want their own way — naturally, if they 
 can get it. They are not much concerned 
 with their complexes. They probably do not 
 take their art-life very seriously — little girls 
 may enjoy dancing barefoot on the green- 
 sward, but they probably think it silly to speak 
 of it as expressing their personalities. If they 
 have more liberty than they once had, let us 
 merely hope that it makes them happier. 
 
The American Child 249 
 
 And let us start a modest catalogue of their 
 merits. 
 
 To begin with, they are probably the clean- 
 est children in the world. We are the most 
 bathing race since the Romans; we exceed 
 them in the number of tubs if not in the fervor 
 of our ablutions. St. James the Less, so the 
 Golden Legend records in his praise, from 
 childhood "never baigned" and was by this 
 known to be holy. Even among his fellow- 
 boys he would obtain less recognition now. 
 American children should be the healthiest in 
 the world. They are the most generously fed, 
 and nowhere in the world is the battle more 
 fierce against the germs that threaten them. 
 Latin children may sit up with their parents 
 and make a good meal at nine in the even- 
 ing, enlivening it with a cup of generous wine. 
 It doesn't seem to hurt them. But our dar- 
 lings, though we allow them great liberty in 
 manners, are in bed early. They resemble St. 
 James the Less in that he never drank wine, 
 mead, or cider. Their milk is certified and 
 their water boiled. Their food is chosen for 
 them according to articles by popular doctors 
 in the women's magazines. It would be sheer 
 perverseness on their part not to be well. 
 
 And we adore them, frankly and without 
 embarrassment. It may safely be predicted 
 
2^0 American Towns and People 
 
 that children will never be nationalized in 
 America, however much their bringing up by 
 government agencies might, scientifically, be 
 to their advantage. Free love, that goal of 
 so many radical futures, may have to be given 
 up just because parents, both men and women, 
 want their children for their own. Of course 
 everywhere in the world there are to-day 
 women who are inclined to wish children 
 were possible without having undignified re- 
 course to a father, so high above all other 
 loves does, with them, the maternal stand. 
 We have lately on the stage seen Madame 
 Nazimova and Miss Marie Doro go insane 
 over this wish of the young girl, not at all to 
 have a husband, but to have children. But 
 American fathers, though little inclined to the 
 miracle of motherless children, value their 
 oflfspring with a spontaneity and a lack of 
 self-consciousness which in many parts of the 
 earth would be astonishing. In short, no one 
 in America need apologize for making a fool 
 of himself over children. 
 
 The American army has given us an en- 
 gaging proof of this. In all the reports that 
 came from France one of the most charming 
 things to hear was the way our boys had made 
 pals with the French children. The little 
 ones adored these strange, good-natured, good- 
 looking men, who had such a passion for 
 
The American Child 2^1 
 
 washing in cold water and smelled so nice. 
 The boys wanted to help the mothers of these 
 children; they were not too proud to offer at 
 once to do "chores" about the house. They 
 made Franco-American friendship a real 
 thing. Individuals, companies, regiments, 
 adopted orphans. Some day they will bring 
 them back to America, and the prettiest, 
 sweetest sentimental comedy will be played as 
 the French boys and girls grow up — La Fille 
 du Regiment done over to suit our case. 
 
 Even in the occupied districts of Germany 
 our army, which has been able to resist every- 
 thing else, has found it hard to resist the chil- 
 dren. Perhaps little Hans and Gretchen 
 when they grow up may find it fairly easy to 
 think well of us, if they are only allowed to 
 cling to their childhood's memories of a good- 
 looking khaki-clad American boy holding 
 them upon his knee. 
 
 At home the war taught us something about 
 our children. They were so sensitive to pa- 
 triotism! They were so generous of their 
 small funds and their little strength! Thou- 
 sands of orphans in France have been adopted 
 by school-children here. Across the seas go 
 letters, and, when the postal regulations allow, 
 shoes and clothing, sometimes sewed by little 
 American girls' fingers. And back come gay 
 foreign picture post-cards and words in funny 
 
252 American Towns and People 
 
 childish writing that try to express the grati- 
 tude of all France. Little stands along our 
 streets where on Saturday afternoon lemonade 
 and rather withered nosegays are sold "for 
 the French orphans" make you smile, and 
 for that instant believe in international friend- 
 ships and the future of the world. 
 
 Whatever his family may be, the child of 
 foreign parents is an American. And he is 
 the great Americanizer. The doctrine he 
 carries home from school he imposes upon 
 them. We may feel sorry that when they 
 might have two languages these foreign chil- 
 dren are willing to have only one — American. 
 But the sturdy impulse to be real citizens of 
 the country where they are to live is worth 
 more than the dual ornament of tongues. 
 Little Giovanni, who insists on being called 
 Joe, and Ignaz, who would like to be known 
 as Mike, we should be proud of. 
 
 Are we not proud of them — as of all Ameri- 
 can children? Do we not fill our magazines 
 with jokes made from children's clever say- 
 ings, and cover our colored supplements with 
 their engaging doings? (Oh, where in the 
 snows of yester-year wanders Buster Brown?) 
 Has any mere short chapter a chance to say 
 even half that should be said about our dar- 
 ling, the American Child? 
 
The Society Woman 
 
 IN treating of the American "Society 
 Woman" we approach a figure epic, yet 
 somehow indefinable. It is difficult to say 
 just what she is, yet impossible to say just what 
 she isn't. She is the glittering figure of 
 triumphant Columbia, incredibly lovely and 
 well dressed, not only devoted passionately to 
 pleasure and the arts, but in the vanguard of 
 a thousand "movements" (for the moment let 
 us be no more precise than this as to which 
 way they move). She is the arbiter of na- 
 tional elegancies and. Heaven knows, she may 
 be the guardian of national destinies. Let us 
 study her with the means at our command. 
 
 The documentary evidence first to hand is 
 naturally in the newspapers. The society 
 woman does not shun publicity; she is in it, as 
 the French say, like a fish in water, not so 
 much rejoicing in the medium in which she 
 swims as knowing no other. For the last 
 forty years at least the press has been cele- 
 brating her. The newspapers should know, 
 yet their facts seem strangely at variance with 
 those observed at first hand. Even now so- 
 
 253 
 
254 American Towns and People 
 
 ciety reporters present the view that the ladies 
 whom they advertise are a race apart, kept in 
 cotton-wool except when they emerge for their 
 purely frivolous activities. We still read this 
 kind of thing in the papers: "Society girl 
 gives up society to study nursing," "Society 
 woman gives up society for landscape garden- 
 ing," "Society favorite gives up society for 
 community work." But the society woman 
 never gives up anything, except an occasional 
 husband en passant. (And even here, in the 
 best circles, a woman does not divorce one hus- 
 band until she is happily engaged to be mar- 
 ried to the next.) Indeed, the life of a so- 
 ciety woman is spent in acquisition rather than 
 renunciation. She does not give up anything 
 for nursing or landscape gardening or com- 
 munity work; sTie merely adds new activities 
 to her old. If she takes to the hospital or the 
 fields or the canteens, "society" — whatever 
 that term as loosely employed by the reporters 
 may mean — is already there or soon will be. 
 She may be more in society than ever, and the 
 cynical may even accuse her of nourishing so- 
 cial ambition at the very heart of her altruism. 
 The stage, too, is responsible for much mis- 
 apprehension on this point. The straight- 
 forward, virile hero so often wonders whether 
 the bewildering "society girl" whom he loves 
 can ever be willing to "give up society" — the 
 
Women of the highest position feel deeply the beauty of the Bolshevik doctrine. 
 
The Society Woman 255 
 
 phrase is by now almost traditional — for his 
 sake. In a well-constructed play she is will- 
 ing, and just previous to being locked in his 
 strong Western arms she usually confesses 
 with an impassioned revulsion that she is 
 "tired of teas." Except among almost over- 
 sophisticated writers *'teas" seem the chief, if 
 not the only, dissipation of all society women 
 but the most vampirish and corrupt. Tea in- 
 deed, which is even now often described in 
 the quaint nineteenth-century way as "pink," 
 is the target for incessant satirical shafts. In 
 a recent play of triangular family life, the 
 lover, a dissipated fellow, had the habit of 
 "teaing" on a regular day every week; this, 
 indeed, appeared to be his chief, if not only 
 opportunity of seeing the fair one, and even 
 here the husband, rushing home to the tea- 
 table, as we are asked to suppose fashionable 
 New York husbands do, was often present. 
 Now, as the lover's attention was wholly pour 
 le bon motif as it were, it is only the more un- 
 likely that through the years he would have 
 been put ofif with tea, and not insisted on lunch 
 or dinner. 
 
 Not that society women would not like to 
 have men to tea! Young foreign gentlemen 
 are generally available and often cozy at this 
 hour, but there are never foreigners enough 
 and tea-drinking has, as a matter of brutal 
 
256 American Towns and People 
 
 fact, been successfully resisted by almost every 
 native son. 
 
 As for "teas" as social functions, every so- 
 ciety woman is ready to give them up, even 
 without being importuned to do so by any 
 Western hero. To frequent nothing but 
 "teas" is to confess social failure. "Teas" of 
 course remain a constant and inexpensive 
 pleasure and method of hospitality in the life 
 of those content to be merely artistic, but no 
 society woman worth her salt is content to be 
 merely anything. 
 
 If the newspapers and the stage fail to re- 
 flect faithfully the richly varied pleasure life 
 of the society woman, they do occasionally 
 recognize her unbending and tireless physique. 
 In a comedy exposing the life of Long Island 
 country houses the exhausted male guests had, 
 at about two in the morning, sought sanctuary 
 as they supposed in the sitting-room of one of 
 their number (it is a pleasure to note the rich- 
 ness of equipment which permits each guest 
 parlor, bedroom, and bath) , but were there in- 
 vaded by the charming rollicking hostess and 
 the ladies of the week-end party who brightly 
 insisted upon bridge till dawn. The endur- 
 ance of society women is beyond belief. As 
 the crowds pour forth from the theaters it is 
 they, clear-eyed and sparkling, who flog their 
 weary male companions to the suppers and the 
 
The Society Woman 257 
 
 cabarets. And they are up in the morning as 
 early as the men, regulating their households, 
 giving and receiving invitations, hustling their 
 secretaries, who, not being society women, are 
 sometimes tired, and arranging to cope with 
 home charity, foreign war relief, suffrage, art, 
 and literature, not to speak of massage, hair- 
 dressing, and psychotherapy. If they are ever 
 weary they are too gallant to show it. Only 
 a year or so ago a lady who had dined, gone 
 to the play, supped and danced, insisted at one 
 in the morning on being deposited at the Eagle 
 Hut where, in evening dress, jewels, and full 
 war paint, she proceeded to do her daily duty 
 by cleaning up the canteen. Society women 
 are indeed an imperishable race — it is not 
 probable that in the more lightly working, less 
 fashionable classes any such stamina exists. 
 Noblesse oblige; and the high resolve to pur- 
 sue an exalted career gives courage and 
 strength to meet its demands. 
 
 The newspapers, though they may not real- 
 ize it, make no great account of exclusiveness ; 
 they speak always of being a society woman 
 as being really a question only of willingness 
 to take up that career. This has made it pos- 
 sible for journalists to write of "prominent 
 society women" in the remotest, smallest ham- 
 let of the land. It is really, in the language 
 of the day, no more than the conventional 
 
258 American Towns and People 
 
 tribute to respectability. In the press it is al- 
 ways a society woman who has six ladies to 
 lunch, the decorations being jonquils, a society 
 woman who organizes the knitting club for 
 Esthonian orphans, and a prominent society 
 woman who is smashed up driving her Ford 
 car over the grade crossing. One must pro- 
 test against the theory that all such richness 
 of experience is only within the reach of one 
 class, unless indeed that class be so broadened 
 that all pretense of exclusiveness is gone. 
 And though the last decade, including the war 
 period, has dealt hard blows to exclusiveness, 
 yet it must still be recognized as one of the 
 society woman's most sparkling jewels. 
 
 Society, of course, has always existed in 
 America, since the stately days of Lady Wash- 
 ington, when really great people were, even in 
 a world made temporarily safe for democracy, 
 given by the courtesy of common speech, un- 
 official titles indicative of their being society 
 women. Ladies in Philadelphia to-day will 
 tell you that they were brought up in a world 
 more insistent on birth and sixteen quarterings 
 (if that be a heraldic or mathematical possi- 
 bility) than any society outside the Viennese 
 aristocracy. And, indeed, it may be so. But 
 this had no great effect upon the free republic 
 of the west. It was not until the newspapers 
 all over the country began to exploit New 
 
The Society Woman 259 
 
 York society that all America, with an eye on 
 the metropolis, began to organize itself as the 
 sheep and the goats. 
 
 Exclusiveness was the contribution of the 
 'eighties to nation-wide snobbishness. The 
 idea of "The Four Hundred," a published list 
 of those who could be described as really in 
 New York society, was a stroke of genius. 
 And an even greater stroke was the later re- 
 vision of this list to "The One Hundred and 
 Fifty," thus publicly expelling into outer 
 darkness those who had, by the earlier too 
 great generosity, been made household names 
 throughout the land. Society, indeed, bristled 
 with redoubts, which the ambitious were con- 
 tinually storming. There were subscription 
 dances with lists artificially and heart-break- 
 ingly short. There is an incredible passage in 
 the late Ward McAllister's book in which he 
 describes how applicants regularly came to 
 him, with documents to prove their ancestry 
 or their financial standing (or more rarely, but 
 happily, both) and plead humbly for recogni- 
 tion. These were the days when to be seen at 
 a certain great lady's house or in her opera 
 box insured a young man free dinners for the 
 next month. And it is a scant forty years ago 
 that one famous fancy-dress ball of fabulous 
 extravagance landed a great family safely in 
 the fold where they now have the air of hav- 
 
260 American Towns and People 
 
 ing originally built the inclosure. For weeks 
 before the fateful evening the whole country 
 waited — even the humble Ohio agriculturist, 
 spitting at the depot store, was fully apprised 
 by his newspaper of all there was at stake. 
 And even he must have experienced at least a 
 relief from strain when it became known that 
 all the best people had gone to the party. 
 Snobbishness was stimulated throughout the 
 whole land. 
 
 But these were indeed simple days, the as- 
 sault of society was a clear military and 
 strategic problem. Now it is much more 
 complicated. Social position is in no one 
 hand to bestow; instead it flies like will-o'-the- 
 wisp before the pursuer. Even ten years ago 
 there were signs of the beginning of the end of 
 exclusiveness. About that time a lady, famous 
 for her wit and independence, asked a young 
 gentlerran, then new to New York, to dine. 
 He arrived, as it happened, early, and his 
 hostess confided to him that he must be compli- 
 mented by being asked to one of her very best 
 parties. 
 
 "They tell me," she said, with a detached 
 air but an odd mocking light in her eye, "that 
 there are only five women in New York who 
 are really fashionable. I don't know about 
 that, but at any rate they are all coming to- 
 night!" 
 
The Society Woman 261 
 
 The young man glowed with pleasure, and 
 his hostess watched him with amusement. 
 Ten, not five, ladies came to dinner, all, to his 
 poor ignorant eye, equally fashionable! 
 
 There is, of course, one class in the modern 
 community which feels quite competent to ap- 
 praise social position, even to award it. 
 These are head waiters, who in the fashionable 
 restaurants herd the elect near the draughty 
 entrance (in what to the unlearned would 
 seem the worst places). A position with 
 waiters is by no means to be despised — a lady 
 constantly seen at the best restaurant tables 
 stands a fair chance of being ultimately wel- 
 comed at the best private boards. Of course 
 many ambitious ladies unhappily never ad- 
 vance further than the best head waiters. But 
 the best head waiters — they may be assured — 
 are much more agreeable companions than 
 anything short of the very best diners-out in 
 society. 
 
 Social position is truly an elusive sprite. 
 Foreign observers were wont to say that 
 Americans, and, indeed, all the untitled in- 
 habitants of all republics, were never sure of 
 their position. Ladies in America are dis- 
 covering at last that, failing patents of nobility 
 or any authoritative list of the Four Hundred, 
 one of the best ways of making people believe 
 you have a social position is to behave as if you 
 
262 American Towns and People 
 
 had one. We may be thought to cite a case 
 of extreme aplomb in the lovely lady who ar- 
 rived an hour late for a dinner-party on a 
 night when she had not been asked, bringing 
 with her two other guests whom she had taken 
 the liberty of inviting, but whose names she 
 had forgotten! Of course considerable per- 
 sonal charm is needed to carry off this sort of 
 thing, but, even so, indisputable social posi- 
 tion only could render it attractive rather than 
 merely careless and rude. 
 
 Whatever perturbations may come, a 
 woman of fashion will always be a woman of 
 fashion however Protean her materializations. 
 And yet it is fair to say that the old simple days 
 of blue-book lists of those in society have gone. 
 The war finished a destruction already begun. 
 Society is not so much occupied now with 
 keeping people out as with dragging them in 
 — that is, people who have the appearance, the 
 tastes, and the money, and will consent to live 
 a society life. The portals are not, of course, 
 really left unguarded; there are a great many 
 of what might, perhaps, be termed "limbering 
 up" exercises which candidates are put 
 through. There are parties to be given, com- 
 mittees joined, and money liberally con- 
 tributed to them. The process, though it 
 seems easier, is really longer than of old, and 
 in the confused state of society there is always, 
 
The Society Woman 263 
 
 even when you seem to be in, the agonizing 
 doubt as to whether, after all, you really are in 
 — in the old days a card to Mrs. Blank's ball 
 stuck in your bureau mirror was so much more 
 reassuring. 
 
 Reference having been made to liberal con- 
 tributions, there is perhaps place here for a 
 generous parenthesis on money, its use and 
 abuse. It cannot be too often insisted on, in 
 any serious study of our best people, that 
 money, at least a decade ago, became so plenti- 
 ful in America, and especially in New York, 
 that it could no longer of itself confer social 
 distinction. Time was when to build a palace 
 and serve nightingales' tongues for dinner was 
 enough. But hostesses became more numer- 
 ous than worth-while guests. One of the 
 town's very most fashionable women, whose 
 own income was only a scant $200,000 a year, 
 put it well when she asked, fastidiously: 
 
 "Why should we wish to have what every 
 Pittsburgh millionaire can have?" 
 
 Ambitious people with money should not, 
 however, unload it too hastily (not, at any 
 rate, just on reading the above paragraph). 
 It has its uses. Society women still feel a 
 warm, pleasant sensation in proximity to a 
 large new fortune. But they want to take the 
 climber's gold on terms consistent with self- 
 respect and dignity. 
 
264 American Towns and People 
 
 Ten years ago two ladies — Mrs. Doe and 
 Mrs. Roe, shall we say? — started to mount the 
 New York ladder. Mrs. Doe abounded in 
 palaces and luxury. At her table you ate 
 nothing in season. At her country house the 
 bathrooms contained always eight kinds of 
 mouth-wash in rare decorated bottles, and six 
 kinds of rouge in gold boxes were provided 
 on the dressing-tables. It was occasionally 
 suggested to prominent young women of taste 
 that they might turn interior decorators, for a 
 commission, and do a room or two in one of 
 the palaces. At Christmas-time the leaders of 
 society sometimes discovered a lovely diamond 
 brooch nestling in a bunch of white violets 
 with Mrs. Doe's card — this was generally re- 
 turned with a statement that the recipient's 
 husband did not permit her to receive gifts, 
 etc. 
 
 Mrs. Roe lived in a much smaller house. 
 Her dinners often did not begin with the real 
 Russian caviar. She had no country place. 
 Her entertaining was extremely simple, some- 
 times just ten or twelve people pigging it in 
 her private car to Palm Beach, where as often 
 as not they themselves paid for their rooms 
 and breakfasts at the hotel. She bestowed no 
 jewels, and yet she is now called by her 
 Christian name (by the way, both ladies under 
 discussion are Christian) by women who have 
 
The Society Woman 265 
 
 by now quite forgotten that Mrs. Doe ever 
 tried to know them. And the simple secret 
 is this — that Mrs. Roe subscribed to every- 
 body's charity and uplift movement while 
 Mrs. Doe did not. No society woman could 
 get at Mrs. Doe's money decently, and on any 
 other terms no one wanted it. If the reports 
 that came in of London and Continental ante- 
 bellum society are true, it is humbly submitted 
 that the moral tale of Mrs. Doe and Mrs. Roe 
 is very much to the credit of our American 
 world of fashion. 
 
 Charity and uplift are in the firm grip of 
 society women. The newspapers during the 
 past years of war have duly noted this; every 
 female who enlisted as a Red Cross nurse, 
 organized a relief committee, or hoed a radish- 
 bed was promptly described as a society 
 woman giving up society to do so. There 
 was, of course, a great deal of folly in war 
 work, a certain amount of what is bitterly de- 
 scribed sometimes as making carnival on the 
 ruins of civilization. Social ambition led 
 many women on, and doubtless a sheer love of 
 pleasure organized many a dance and bazar 
 for the benefit of the tortured victims of the 
 Hun. When the time comes to write the his- 
 tory of war relief, a certain number of its 
 pages will inevitably be comic relief. It 
 would be pleasant, even now, to tell the story 
 
266 American Towns and People 
 
 of the ambitious lady who failed to get on any 
 of the really fashionable war committees, and 
 ultimately made a delightful place for herself 
 by the fortunate discovery of the obscure but 
 deserving race of Uro-Russicks and the im- 
 mediate organization of a committee for 
 their relief. Such anecdotes prove little. It 
 would be narrow and uncomprehending to 
 deny the realness and vitality of the emotion 
 which set the best-advertised women of our 
 country to work. Perhaps the fact that their 
 gowns came from Paris did heighten their 
 sympathies for France. But, in any case, 
 when the whirlwind of our national indigna- 
 tion rose to its noble and passionate height, 
 these daughters of America were gallantly in 
 movement with it. 
 
 The justice, too, must be done them to note 
 the fact that war relief sought them as much as 
 they sought war relief. The American public 
 is the most sensitive in the world to advertise- 
 ment and, next to actresses (who still, in some 
 hard-shell circles, inspire a vague distrust), 
 society women were the best known. A hard- 
 headed business man, organizing a war com- 
 mittee, knew that.he had to have well-known 
 names on his list (and in addition a compe- 
 tent salaried office staff to do the work). He 
 requisitioned a dozen society women in prime 
 condition just as he ordered white paper and 
 
The Society Woman 267 
 
 blotters and typewriting machines. It almost 
 seemed as if the oftener a society woman's 
 name appeared on committee lists the more 
 valuable it was. So no one should blame them 
 if self-sacrificing patriots went on every com- 
 mittee that offered. 
 
 If it is the fashion to be patriotic it is also 
 in less degree the vogue to be intelligent. 
 This must not be confused with being ar- 
 tistic. For a long time now society women in 
 America have vibrated sensitively at the touch 
 of Art. This has been immensely serviceable 
 in the civilizing of the American social 
 wilderness. When they packed their trunks 
 for the homeward voyage from Europe they 
 put in, every time, a good deal of taste. So- 
 ciety women have learned to deal competently 
 with painting, sculpture, furniture, and all 
 the decorative arts. They have reclaimed our 
 domestic architecture until all over the land 
 the new American "homes" average higher in 
 taste and luxury than the new habitations of 
 any country in the world. They are introduc- 
 ing actors to other people who are not actors, 
 a movement fraught with hope for the future 
 of that race. They entertain artists of every 
 description at their tables. They form a large 
 support for concerts and they are the backbone 
 — as may be seen — of the opera. A long and 
 exquisite passage might, it is obvious, be 
 
268 American Towns and People 
 
 written on the curious fact that high social 
 position always goes with a delicate flair for 
 art, foreign art preferred. But it was when 
 society women annexed intelligence and 
 public interests that the old-fashioned mem- 
 bers of good society saw the beginning of the 
 end. 
 
 The suffrage movement, from the moment 
 that it involved the younger leaders, threat- 
 ened society with the vogue of intelligence. 
 It is nothing now for a woman of fashion to 
 be on a state board of lunacy or a commission 
 for subtropical bacteriological study or a 
 committee for propaganda of American ideals 
 in Portuguese East Africa. Society women 
 feel deeply on educational and sociological 
 questions. Some of them constantly keep on 
 the premises an editor or two of some intel- 
 lectual weekly or one of the fashionable 
 socialists. Women of the highest position 
 feel deeply the beauty of the Bolshevik doc- 
 trine and burst into tears if any one talks 
 of intervention in Russia. When the police 
 break up red flag meetings they are sure to 
 find some society women in the best boxes. 
 It may serve as an encouragement or as a 
 warning to revolutionists, who may take their 
 choice, but it may be prophesied that if Soviets 
 are ever set up in America they will be 
 
The Society Woman 269 
 
 "Councils of Workmen and Soldiers and So- 
 ciety Women." 
 
 This is, of course, the extreme and serious 
 view, as all students of society women must ad- 
 mit. Things have not everywhere gone so 
 far. But the intellect and the war combined 
 have, however, already worked revolutionary 
 changes in the habits and customs of the sub- 
 ject of this article. It is, for example, no 
 longer de rigeur to talk all through the opera; 
 in fact, to do so is really old-fashioned. Peo- 
 ple, if they like, remain till the end with al- 
 most no embarrassment; in the old days one 
 of the leaders was alleged to rise in her box 
 precisely at the same hour, no matter what was 
 happening on the stage, and say, with the all 
 too sweet air of one already martyred and 
 sainted for music's sake: "It's half past ten. 
 I should think it would be all right for us 
 to go now." 
 
 People even arrive on time for the opera 
 sometimes. How old-fashioned already seem 
 the days when one of the hostesses most highly 
 placed always sat down to dinner on her opera 
 nights at the exact hour when the curtain rose 
 at the Metropolitan, and complained bitterly 
 of the German operas which began at seven 
 forty-five, necessitating dining at that uncom- 
 fortable hour! 
 
270 American Towns and People 
 
 Intellectual society women are devoted to 
 the theater, too, and often have plans to uplift 
 it. But the feeling unquestionably prevails 
 that a theater which began at nine or nine- 
 thirty could be more easily uplifted. People 
 are willing, indeed, to dine early — say at 
 seven-thirty or seven forty-five if they are go- 
 ing to the play — but somehow even that sacri- 
 fice doesn't seem to bring them there for much 
 of the first act. 
 
 This picture of society in the ardors and 
 suf^ferings of a transition period is, however, 
 not meant to imply that ladies live without 
 pleasure. Entertainments were smaller dur- 
 ing the war; let us, indeed, freely admit that 
 they were on a higher intellectual and spirit- 
 ual plane, but fairly continuous. An ex- 
 tremely pretty blonde was heard lately to re- 
 mark, with an engaging naivete: 
 
 "My husband and I dined at home last night 
 for the first time in months, and to my as- 
 tonishment I find we have an extremely good 
 cook!" 
 
 It is just possible to argue of society that the 
 more it changes the more it is the same thing. 
 It used to be smart to be heavily engaged 
 ahead. Now the fashion has changed. One 
 lovely creature swears that she never settles 
 before 6 P. M. what she is going to do of an 
 evening. But as she is always out it must be 
 
The Society Woman 271 
 
 presumed that enough invitations come in 
 about tea-time so that her pleasure is never 
 really curtailed. Every one would prefer to 
 wait till the last moment and accept the best 
 thing that offers; not every one dares take the 
 risk. But our charming reformer genuinely 
 thinks she is taking steps nearer the simple 
 life. 
 
 Even when little dinners were for the pur- 
 pose of talking over war work they were still 
 little dinners and very pleasant. And it seems 
 likely that reconstruction dinners will be 
 equally agreeable — if the supply of men holds 
 out! 
 
 Here again, as in any article written on 
 American society during the last decade or 
 two, we touch that eternal and heart-breaking 
 topic, the dearth of men. It is bad enough in 
 ordinary times, but war made it worse. And, 
 as always, foreigners gallantly stepped into the 
 breach. The embassies, the committees, the 
 various high commissions all contributed. 
 Society, when it blazed with anything, blazed 
 with uniforms. And later on, as men who 
 had seen service began to be invalided over 
 here, the supply increased. That many of 
 these young gentlemen were crippled and so 
 totally defenseless was a fact viewed almost 
 with equanimity by women of fashion, deter- 
 mined to fill their opera boxes and their 
 
272 American Towns and People 
 
 dinner-tables at the cost even of tears and 
 blood. 
 
 Again, as so often in the past, little censor- 
 ship was exercised upon foreigners — it is a na- 
 tional weakness. One of the notable social 
 successes of the war season in a great Eastern 
 city was a sleek swivel-chair hero in khaki, of 
 whom his compatriots continue darkly to 
 mutter that he was in London a mere clerk of 
 sorts with no social position at all. He could 
 dine out — and would — eight times a night if 
 that were physically possible. And yet his 
 simple debut was when a lady, whom a male 
 dinner guest had failed at the eleventh hour, 
 telephoned a peremptory demand to the head 
 of a foreign military mission to conscript and 
 send her some one, something, anything male 
 that would dine, and she would ask no ques- 
 tions beyond inquiring his name when he 
 arrived. 
 
 Society women seem indestructible. And 
 yet it would be a rash man who would 
 prophesy that society is as enduring as its ele- 
 ments. Some of these ladies, as has been 
 hinted, mean to head the Revolution that every 
 one is talking about. Others, with a shiver 
 down the spine which is not altogether un- 
 pleasant, feel themselves already mounting the 
 tumbrils with a sense of kinship to the French 
 aristocracy of Louis XVFs day — and it may 
 
The Society Woman 273 
 
 be guessed that it is the ladies most recently 
 arrived in the sacred inclosure of society who 
 feel most strongly how like the old nobility 
 they are going to be in case of trouble. 
 Others, more prudent, are said to be unearth- 
 ing the portraits of the honest founders of the 
 family, proletarian grandfathers in cowhide 
 boots and overalls, and hanging them where 
 the mobs can see them at once when they smash 
 in the palace doors. Others — and aren't they, 
 after all, the majority? — mean to confront the 
 future gallantly, cheerfully, and with our 
 characteristic American feeling that somehow 
 the country is all right and that, whatever hap- 
 pens, every citizen has a fair chance to come 
 to the top or the front. And that chance is all 
 the society woman wants. 
 
 A great deal of nonsense is talked and 
 written about society women — probably some 
 has been written here. Are they, we had 
 better ask, any better or worse than the nation 
 at large? An American woman at a great 
 party in London was accosted by a foreign 
 gentleman whom she could not seem to re- 
 member. Was she, he asked, enjoying the 
 party? She put up her fan to give privacy 
 to an instant of confidential coquetry and said, 
 no, she wasn't; there were too many royalties 
 present. He laughed and passed on, and her 
 horror-stricken companion informed her that 
 
274 American Towns and People 
 
 she had spoken in this fashion to a well-known 
 king! This lady, we may be sure, will be 
 quite competent to deal with a new world 
 where there are no royalties. May we not 
 humbly hope that the society woman will per- 
 sist, that she will somehow manage to be 
 beautiful and well-dressed and that she will 
 continue to do her best for America and to 
 insist that America do its best for her? 
 
 627 ^ 
 
 THE END. 
 
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